Measuring the Whole Picture

The biggest key to running an effective Help Desk is measurement. The volume of requests from end users is too high to use subjective measurements. Each request has important data that must be translated into meaningful performance metrics.

In the world of projects, you see the execution unfold over several months. You know what the handful of sponsors and participants of the project think about how the project is going. Sure, measurement is important in project work, but you measure much of it at the post mortem.

In the transactional world of the Help Desk, requests may be opened and closed within minutes, hours, or days. The customers making these requests may number in the thousands every year. As a result, capturing the right measurements is crucial at the transaction level.

So what do you measure? There are four critical to quality (CTQ) goals that should be satisfied by every Help Desk:

• Accessibility
• Turn Around Time
• Courtesy
• Communication

Accessibility measures how long customers wait on the phone before an analyst answers. It may also be the amount of time between an email or web request and a ticket being created and communicated back to the customer. The abandon rate helps to add the customer’s level of satisfaction.

Turn Around Time measures how long it took to resolve the customer’s request. This can be broken down into various categories: percent of first-call resolution; percent of cases resolved on the Help Desk; and average days to resolve a request.

Courtesy is a very subjective measure, but an important one, nevertheless. When users call your Help Desk, they have probably already tried solving their own problem. They may have asked their coworkers and be at the breaking point of frustration. So they call the Help Desk. It is important that you measure how courteous the analyst expresses herself through listening, empathy, and professionalism. How do you measure this? Through customer surveys. You may also use call monitoring to create sample data for coaching, but ultimately, the customer knows best.

Communication is another metric that is difficult to quantify. Again, rely on your customers to let you know if you communicated frequently enough, clearly enough, and with the right level of detail.

Now that you have your main metrics, keep in mind that sometimes improving in one CTQ may make another worse. For example, if you emphasize courtesy and create a high touch environment, your accessibility may go down as analysts spend more time on the phone. Keeping all four areas in view simultaneously will yield the best measurement of customer satisfaction and overall effectiveness.