5 Of The Best High Performance Outsourced Service Desk SLA Metrics

When it comes to managing your service desk, it's important to serve your customers and make sure they get resolved properly and in a timely manner. So if you want to solve your customer's requirements in a timely and accurate way (and a good support professional wants to do it) then you need to measure the metrics for these two things, right?

Of course.

In this post, we list and explain five service level agreement metrics that high-performance service counters need to measure regularly. This is not necessarily an exhaustive list, but it is a basic list of metrics that every service manager should use. If you have other people please share them in the comments section below. We would like to discuss how to best assess the success of your outsourced service desk.

Time For First Response

One of the key factors in operating a high-performance service desk is responsiveness. Even if we know that a full resolution will take a few days, we want to know that we can fulfill your request. One way to measure this is to use the Time to first response metric. The time for the first response is the time between the customer making a request and the help desk agent who "picks up" the ticket and begins reading it. What does "collect" mean? When a service desk agent opens a ticket and begins to read it, the ticket is considered "picked up." Opening the ticket places the ticket in a workflow state that is equivalent to In Progress. This means that service desk agents must understand that when they open a ticket and start reading it, the customer is notified.

Notifying the customer is part of what makes this metric a measure of response. You should be able to see the request and see its current status, and if that status indicates that the ticket is "in progress," you know that someone has started working on that ticket. doing. The customer saw this and was immediately glad someone opened the ticket and at least started. A high performance service desk takes the importance of telling the current status of the ticket so that customers always know what to expect.

Time To Solve

Yes, it is great to get your first answer quickly. The client wants to know that you respond and communicate. But what you really want is to solve the problem in the most efficient way possible. A high performance service desk needs to measure the resolution time, which is the total time for problem resolution. This metric seems very simple, but there are some nuances to consider. What if the problem requires additional customer information? Do you want to count the time a ticket spends waiting for a customer response? What happens if the service desk agent asks the customer for more information and if the customer takes 4 days to respond? Are these 4 days waiting for a customer to count against a service agent?

On the surface, this is not as easy as it sounds, because we don't want to count the time you expect customers to respond to service desk metrics. However, some managers think that it doesn't matter who waits for whom. If the ticket is opened, it will not be resolved. Also, everything that happens between "create" and "solve" is related to the time it takes to solve the problem. The key is to define the resolution time in a way that matches the culture and find a tool that is flexible enough to handle how to define and measure the resolution time.

Time To Wait For Support

Deciding whether to track (or exclude from the metric) the amount of time customers wait is one. Tracking how long a ticket spends in the hands of a service desk agent is another. Waiting for support is a more important measure of the time a ticket spends in the hands of a service desk agent and is even more important. Responding Tickets often travel between service desk agents and customers. If most of the time is spent at the service desk, the manager may want to know if this time is reasonable. The service desk manager may not be able to control the customer's reaction while the ticket is open. In fact, you must monitor the reaction of the service desk agents and the time that the people on your team work on problems. Service desk managers can identify whether a specific team or individual is serving a customer by measuring support latency.

It Is Time To Wait For A Third Party.

There may be customer requests that require a third party (a team member other than technical support) to confirm, approve, or enter the customer's request. For example, a customer may report to technical support that the keyboard or mountain does not work. If the solution is to buy a new keyboard, it may require approval from the customer's manager, the purchasing department, or the finance department. If this is the case for your company, what happens if the acquisition approval process takes 48 to 72 hours? Do you count this in your service level agreements with your customers? If there is no way to put the ticket "waiting for approval" and stop the clock, some service counters may try to close the problem because that part has been completed and manually submit the purchase request. What to do. This is bad practice for obvious reasons, as it interrupts the workflow, stops tracking, and makes the process less transparent.

The way to handle this is to have a workflow stage waiting for the third party and stop the clock while the ticket is in this workflow state (of course you can define this in the JIRA Service Desk). For starters, you can measure the true service level of your team, but you can also measure the service level of another department and provide that data to purchases.