TOPdesk KPIs: setting and tracking targets

Most service desks already track figures such as open incidents, SLA compliance and resolution time, but often without a target. In that case you cannot tell whether 84% SLA compliance is good news or bad. If nobody owns the figure, it is also unclear who should act on it.

Which figures to track is covered in ITSM dashboard for small teams: what to measure. This article follows on from it.

A target and an owner turn a figure into a KPI

A figure tells you what happened, and a KPI adds what should have happened and who follows it up. “Resolution time has gone up” leads to a discussion about causes. If the report says “Resolution time has been over the second-line target for three weeks”, the conversation ends with you and the second-line team lead agreeing on what to do about it.

SLA compliance is often owned by the service desk manager, and the resolution time of an operator group by its team lead. Where possible, give each KPI a single owner.

What TOPdesk itself offers

TOPdesk has its own KPI feature. In TOPdesk, a KPI is a chart that shows the current state of a process and its trend. KPIs are based on the fields of the Report Wizard, so you can only create them for processes that have a Report Wizard.

You create a KPI from the Dashboard of the process, using the KPI Wizard. For each KPI, you set a norm value, a warning boundary and an error boundary. According to TOPdesk, the norm value is the value that is normally reached. In a bar chart, the bars are green when the norm value is reached, orange when the warning boundary is reached and red at the error boundary.

If a lower number is worse for your figure, as with SLA compliance, you set the norm value higher than the error boundary in a spark diagram, and the colouring is reversed. If you display the KPI as a gauge, it can also work with a lower limit. When you save the KPI, you choose who it is for. Who follows it up is something your team has to agree on.

TOPdesk is also building a Reporting Hub, which is in beta as of September 2026 and available only in English. According to TOPdesk, it is meant to gradually replace the Report Wizard. The documentation does not say what this means for the KPI Wizard. The hub’s Call dashboard has a Compliance tab that shows, in green, yellow or red, the share of incidents resolved by their target date. The documentation does not mention setting your own norm value there.

Five figures that deserve a target

Not every figure needs a target. Incoming volume is worth tracking, but your team has little control over it. The five figures below are ones the team can influence itself.

SLA compliance

Set a minimum for the percentage of incidents resolved by their target date. In TOPdesk, a setting determines whether the SLA is assessed on completion or on closure, and On Hold can shift the target date. So decide in advance what you count. If two reports give two different percentages, the meeting is spent discussing the figure, and the performance behind it gets little attention.

Resolution time

Here you set a maximum, in hours or days. TOPdesk offers several durations, including the Actual duration and the Adjusted duration, which leaves out the time On Hold. Pick one, and also choose between the average and the median. A few incidents that stayed open for months pull the average up, and they have less effect on the median. For the Actual duration, the report fields give the average but not a median. You can, however, group by percentile in the KPI Wizard.

Response time

Response time is the time until an incident is picked up. It is the first thing the caller notices, and something a team can improve quickly. In TOPdesk, you track it with Responded and a response target date. Agree with the operator groups on when an incident counts as responded to, so that everyone measures the same thing.

Open incidents

For open incidents, set a maximum number. Also agree when you take the count, because the number on a Monday morning is not the same as on a Friday afternoon. The number grows along with the organisation, so you will revisit this target more often than the others.

Reopenings

The share of incidents reopened after being completed or closed acts as a check on resolution time. If a team is judged on speed alone, incidents get closed sooner, and the ones closed too early end up being reopened. First check whether you can count reopenings at all, because TOPdesk’s Call Management report fields do not include a field for them.

Choosing an achievable target

If the team never meets a target, people forget about it within a few months. A target that is met every month changes nothing. Your own historical figures show roughly where it should sit. TOPdesk’s own blog post on service desk KPIs also recommends starting with a baseline and comparing against benchmarks only after that. The post advises choosing a target that is challenging but realistic.

1. Look at how the figure has developed over a period that includes a busy month.
2. Break it down by priority. Overall SLA compliance of 88% can mean that low and normal priorities are comfortably within the SLA while the highest priority consistently falls short.
3. Set your first target slightly better than what you achieve now. In TOPdesk, the norm value is by definition what is normally reached, so agree whether to enter your target there. Then green and orange mean the same thing to everyone.
4. Use a warning boundary if your tool supports one, so that “just missed” and “clearly off” look different.
5. Review the target at set intervals, for example every quarter, and leave it alone if one month disappoints.

The target next to the actual figure

Put the target next to the figure, where people already look.

• A tile showing met or missed. The current figure, with a line underneath saying whether the target is met.
• A target line in the trend chart. The chart shows whether you are missing the target and since when.
• Met or missed in the scheduled report. For people who do not sign in, such as the management team, “met” or “not met” for each target is often enough.

In each case, a missed target only shows up when someone looks or the next report arrives. A signal that is sent when a threshold is crossed reaches the owner without anyone having to look. In TOPdesk, a date on a card, such as an approaching target date, can trigger an action, for example an email. The action applies to the incident on that card and does not work on an aggregate figure such as a KPI. Data alerts on a Power BI dashboard are visible only to the person who sets them, although Power Automate can pass them on to others.

Set the threshold so that it is not crossed every day, because within a week people stop reading a message that arrives daily.

How AureaDesk handles this

From Pro upwards, you go to Settings in AureaDesk to set KPI targets for SLA compliance, resolution time (median), average response time, open incidents and reopenings. For SLA compliance, AureaDesk uses the target date that TOPdesk sets on the incident, and a closed incident is assessed at the moment of closure. An incident that is On Hold and past its target date counts as breached. The percentage can differ from an SLA report in TOPdesk.

The tiles on the Overview, in Incident Management and on the Wallboard then show whether the target is met. The SLA compliance over time chart draws your target as a line, and the scheduled report shows whether the target was met for SLA compliance, resolution time, response time and open incidents, but not for reopenings.

If you filter Incident Management by priority, the key figures adjust to that selection. You can see your own history in the charts over time. AureaDesk records the daily number of open incidents itself from the moment you connect, so for that target you need to build up history first. AureaDesk reads reopenings from the TOPdesk reporting connection.

A missed target does not trigger a separate signal. For a signal, you choose a key figure and your own threshold, and you are notified by email (in Pro and Enterprise, also in Microsoft Teams or Slack) when a check finds the figure above it. The Pricing page shows which signals are included in each package.

Two targets to start with

Start with two targets that balance each other, such as resolution time and reopenings if you can already count them, and give each one an owner. Discuss them at the same regular meeting for three months before you add a third.

Sources, accessed 24 September 2026: TOPdesk’s documentation on creating KPIs, spark diagrams, the gauge, response times, events that trigger actions, On Hold and SLAs, call reports, the Reporting Hub and the Call dashboard, and Microsoft’s documentation on data alerts in Power BI.