Service Desk Metrics

Earlier in my career I had the pleasure of managing a Service Desk. This function is the unsung hero of IT support!

We had a multitude of measurements and metric that were taken every day and then meticulously charted, reported and analyzed. At the time it’s what we did.

I recently had the opportunity to visit my old Service desk and found to my horror, that many of these metrics were no longer being used. I also was informed that customer satisfaction had not dropped significantly and that some of the KPI still being measured were well within an acceptable range. Now that I no longer am in the thick of it, I took some time to really think about what was it we were measuring and what did it really mean. As an organization we did all of the industry best practices measurements.

Speed of answer
Call duration
Number of calls per day/week/month and analyst
Abandoned calls
Number of tickets opened versus number of tickets closed
Percentage 1st call resolved
Customer satisfaction survey

After talking with my former staff, what began to emerge was that with the limited resources that were now available for the management of this process it was decided to limit these KPIs to what really impacted the customer. How was it decided what impacted the customer? They asked and not through a survey sheet but by talking with each and every customer that called or emailed. From the this response, reporting was boiled down to several core KPIs that really mattered to the customers. In this difficult business environment, with seemingly less and less resources we must review what it is we do and ask “Does this provide value? Does this enhance the customer’s experience? Is it important to the delivery of our services? Communication and a willingness to continually ask do I provide value is the key to ongoing success.

Comments

Unknown said…

You mentioned that your old service desk had reduced the metrics that they tracked and reported on to those they found really mattered to their customers. Which metrics were they?

April 4, 2011 at 9:40 AM

Professor P. Ross S. Wise said…

The one customer metric that was kept was Service Availability. This measured the availability of the service being delivered to the customer location. It also showed all of the incidents that impacted the delivery of the service. This was still being done on a monthly basis. The desk was still keeping the standard Help desk metrics such as time to answer, average duration and %of 1st call resolve but, these were being utilized by the desk only. IT management was no longer looking at these as valuable tools.

June 11, 2011 at 2:47 PM

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