All of us have heard the famous adage – prevention is better than cure. This holds true when it comes to your help desk. You should check the health of your help desk to spot problem areas and fix them before they escalate and adversely affect your customers’ experience.

If you decide in favor of help desk outsourcing, it becomes even more critical to keep track of the efficiency your service provider in managing your help desk.

Here are 10 metrics that can help you monitor the health of your help desk:

• New tickets: The ticket tracking system is the core of your help desk. By assessing how many new tickets your help desk handles in a month, week, or day, you can plan your staffing requirements.
• Customer’s preferred contact method: These days, customers can contact your help desk through phone calls, emails, web forms, chats, or social networking platforms. Since each of these modes requires different skills, identifying, tracking, and preparing for each contact method is crucial for determining your staffing needs and for responding quickly to help desk requests.
• Tickets solved: By assessing if your help desk can solve most of the ticket requests that come in a week without escalation to higher tier support, you can decide whether your help desk is working efficiently or falling behind.
• Reply and wait times: Long first reply and wait times lead to dissatisfied customers. Within a reasonable time period after your customer makes a request, your help desk should send at least an acknowledgement that the problem is being worked on. Whether you opt for help desk outsourcing to handle technology infrastructure management issues or managed security services, wait times too should be reduced to ensure that issues are being resolved without much delay.
• Resolution time: After a ticket is created, the time taken to solve it for the first time is called the first resolution time. If the ticket is re-opened one or more times to further correct a customer issue, this time is called the full resolution time. An increasing gap between these two times means that more training is required to speed up the resolution times.
• Backlog: If the number of tickets solved in a week is much less than the new requests, there’s bound to be a backlog. When this happens, it would indicate that your help desk is overwhelmed by support requests, and needs more staff and resources to solve the tickets.
• Predicted backlog: Calculating the predicted backlogs helps you note where the team is falling behind and take appropriate measures.
• Ticket distribution: Scrutinizing your ticket distribution can alert you about a persistent problem with your products/services. If you notice a sudden increase in the amount of support requests coming to your help desk, you should check for underlying issues and report them to appropriate internal staff for resolution.
• Satisfaction ratings: With reports and dashboards of customer satisfaction ratings, you can spot problems with your help desk and products/services.
• Employee performance: By identifying which help desk professionals are top performers and which ones need additional training and resources, task allocation can be streamlined.

Summary: Ensuring that your customers are happy with your products and services is crucial for the success of your business. Use the 10 metrics above to monitor the health of your help desk and keep your customers satisfied with your service.

About Keshav

Keshav is a senior executive with diverse experience in sales, business development, marketing and operations, currently leading the Technology and Business Process outsourcing practice. He has been credited for innovative results delivered to large corporations on service improvement, cost control and revenue growth, through leadership in strategic planning, process design, technology innovation and change management.
 
Keshav holds a Bachelor Degree in Engineering and a diploma in Computer Science. He has undergone professional training in Sales and Marketing Management, Project Management, ITIL v3, ISO 9001 and Product Management methods. You can reach Keshav on Google+ & LinkedIn