Service Desk Measurement - Be careful what you wish for!
Mini-series on measurements that can come back to bite you…..
The trouble with performance metrics is that they can actually encourage inefficiency, de-motivate resources and result in misinformed management decisions if not thoughtfully designed and carefully monitored!
Take for example an organization that has a published target for their Service Desk’s ability to resolve inquiries at the first point of contact (FPOC rate).
This measure is expected to positively impact two important facets of the service desk – customer satisfaction and cost.
Customer Satisfaction - The premise behind this measure is that customers’ satisfaction is positively impacted by quick resolutions. After all, who doesn’t like to have their questions/issues resolved quickly and without being transferred or bounced around an organization?
Cost - Generally organizations have tiered levels of support with resource costs increasing at each level. It makes sense that the more incidents/inquiries that can be resolved at FPOC, without handoffs to more expensive tiers of technical support, the more money that can be saved.
Also, organizations often use this measure to compare themselves to other service desk organizations and to communicate their service desk’s value proposition.
While on the surface this seems simple, practical and a no-brainer there are potential “gotchas”. Consider the following simple scenario.
An organization’s service desk proudly promotes an FPOC rate of 80% or better consistently month-over- month. Remarkably the Desk has been able to maintain this for 6 straight months! Agent’s performance reports show that individually they are meeting or exceeding their assigned FPOC targets. Comparisons to other service desks FPOC are favourable and management assumes this is a very positive measure – right?
Maybe not, a High FPOC rate may actually be signalling a lot of repetitive incidents. Agents at the desk can get very skilled and efficient at resolving the same issues over and over again and the hidden cost can be easily overlooked.
Points to Ponder
While initially customers will be pleased with a timely restoration of the service, their satisfaction will drop quickly if they keep having the same problems over and over again.
Resolving the incident quickly with lower cost resources is, on the surface, efficient; however, if that incident is happening repeatedly what is the total cost of the repetitive incident?
From a value perspective, which desk would you choose? One that has an 80% FPOC but is continuously resolving the same type of incidents or one that has a 50% FPOC but continuously reviews incidents trends and permanently removes repetitive incidents from their environment?
Simple Tips
1. Don’t look at your FPOC in isolation. Always look for correlation to satisfaction trends and hidden costs.
2. Seek out and destroy repetitive incidents. Analyze the types of incidents that are being resolved FPOC and identify repetitive incidents for permanent resolution.
3. Use your incident data to “expose the cost” of repetitive incidents and be sure to report the cost savings/avoidance achieved by removing the incidents right along beside your new, possibly lower FPOC number.
4. Your service desk agents are a great source of information on your top repetitive incidents – tap into their knowledge & experience. Reward them for identifying repetitive incidents and other improvement opportunities.
One Final Thought with a Bit of a New Twist on an Old Measure
Many desks set high FPOC rates but then do not give the agents the tools or permissions they need to achieve it!
If you have a lower than desired FPOC resolution rate, you may want to consider measuring “designed for FPOC”. You may be surprised to find that your service desk is actually not able to achieve an acceptable FPOC because of the way your support delivery is designed!
Too often the service desk is not provided with the necessary information (troubleshooting scripts, configuration information, etc) or the necessary permissions to actually resolve incidents at FPOC.
This very simple measure, “FPOC by Design”, reflects an organization that has designed support specifically for each product/service, and is monitoring how well its service desk is performing against achievable targets.
Low FPOC on a product that has been designed for FPOC provides an important area to analyze agent performance and training opportunities. Conversely, high incident areas with low FPOC for products/services NOT designed for FPOC make be a great place to review the support model and look for opportunities to empower your service desk further.
Measurement is definitely an important part of continuously improving your Service Desk and driving up value and customer satisfaction. Relentless review of relevant, insightful metrics will keep you at the forefront. Next time let’s look at Mean Time to Restore Service (MTRS)………
Question
Have you come across any measures that have done you more harm than good? Do you have any really GOOD or really BAD measurement stories to share? I’d love to hear them……
My help desk spent time and effort learning about what reports we should be generating, provided them to management and then was told after two months to stop producing them as no one was interested in looking at them anyway. To say that this was discouraging to the team was an understatement. Do you have any suggestions about how to re-engage senior IT management as to the value proposition of the reports the help desk provides to end this type of cycle?
This is actually a more common problem than you may think - sometimes management just doesn’t know what’s good for them. Truth is they are often bombarded with information (often more like pages of data) that fail to help them make decisions. Somehow your Help Desk reports need to provide the “At-A-Glance” information that is relevant and actionable. I have a couple of thoughts for you to consider….
Ask Them What They Need! - If they aren’t interested in looking at what you are producing, find out what they would be interesting in looking at. The service desk is the moment of truth for your IT services and organization. It provides an important touch point with your users and in return collects very valuable information that, if presented properly, is a gold mine for actionable improvements and early warning to pending issues and customer dissatisfaction.
Find the Dog to Put the Flea On! If your not ready to approach senior management to draw out their requirements, then seek out that little itch that you can scratch for them. Use your knowledge of the information available from your service desk and link it to an issue you know is top of mind with your management team. Too often service desk reports speak about incident volumes and FPOC rates, when what management really needs to hear is that there is a spike in outages for a particular application solution that is really impacting the business. When it comes to reporting
Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast! Find the critical few out of the important many reports that you have available. Before you know it your Service Desk will be recognized as an invaluable source for customer satisfaction and service improvement information.