Quick ROI
- There are a lot of service desk metrics
- Worry about and focus on the important ones
- Talk to your customers about the service they want
- Don't forget to manage how you deliver the service, as well as what you are delivering
Service desk metrics -
Service desk is great, there are so many things that are available to measure, and so many cool acronyms to use ASA, FPR, MTR, etc, etc, etc. We tend to measure everything we can, irrespective of the importance, if we can control it, or if anyone actually cares! So often a lot of effort will go into measuring and reporting numbers because "we always have", stop doing it for a while and see if anyone notices!
So what is important to measure?
Service desks have 3 groups to focus on -
- Customer (who actually pays for the service, and possibly negotiates the SLA's)
- Users (person who actually users the service)
- Callers (person making the call for assistance)
Each group will see the service desk differently, and each group will have different views on the service that they want \ need from the service desk. It is important to engage with each group to understand what is important to them, and to better understand then what needs to be measured.
A focus on what the customer want, be it based on their experience when calling for assistance as a caller, or a cost effective service with agreed trade off as a customer is important, and work needs to be done to find out what outcomes these groups are looking for.
What do customers want? Ask them!
Each group will express their requirements differently, it is the role of the service desk to understand these requirements, and convert them into a meaningful metric that can then be measured. EG. callers will want the phone to be answered ASAP. The service desk needs to work with the callers to better understand what they mean by ASAP, and, what an acceptable wait time may be (given limited resources).
Work with the groups to find out what service levels are acceptable to each, and try to drive concencus where possible!
Don't forget - measure your service delivery
Its not enough to just meet the metrics agreed with your customer groups, if everytime they call you they cringe because of your customer service skills. The most important aspect of the service desk is to deliver service, and this does not just mean fixing things. Measure your customer service delivery also, even if it is not part of your agreeded metrics, because even if you are hitting all your numbers, it means nothing if your reputation is one of an area that is hard to do business with, or, that you are more interested in hitting the metrics then helping customers with their problems.
