Effective help desk performance measurement

Does technology make our lives easier or more difficult? Try to live without it and you will find the answer. Most of us will not be able to go back and live life without the benefits that information technology brings to our life. As long as there is a helping hand that assists in making this technology our friend and servant then the answer is yes, technology makes our life easier.

We are surrounded by technology. We are reliant on it and in some cases even dependent on it. Could we live without it? It is a difficult question to answer. It is not food or water or air we breathe, however it has become an indispensable part of our lives. It would be a hard lesson to learn to live without it again.

The world of technology is constantly developing. More and more new gadgets are being developed and produced every year. The ones that are already in use are being upgraded and refined. No doubt they do make our lives convenient, easy and fast. At the same time most of us need a helping hand in mastering the intricate functions of advanced modern contraptions. Help Desks or Technical Support services perform the function of such a helping hand.

Help Desks serve as mediators between information technology and the users. Help Desks assist users in exploiting the features and advantages of information technology systems as well as troubleshooting issues caused by the same. Effective Help Desks that successfully complete their mission can considerably contribute to the prosperity of the organization they support.

A though-out scorecard based on clever metrics could put the effectiveness of your Help Desk to test. For a long time Help Desk performance was diagnosed based on the number of calls answered and the length of the calls. The less time an agent spent resolving the caller’s problem, the more telephone calls he/she could answer. “The more the better” is a powerful slogan in business. There is nothing wrong with keeping track of numerical statistics as long as the priority remains with quality. In other words, a qualitative scorecard measuring Help Desk performance should include some other metrics as well. For instance, the excellence of the services provided can say much more about the effectiveness of the Help Desk.

Customer satisfaction should become the cornerstone of a true scorecard in this case. After all this is exactly one of the principal missions of any Help Desk. Measuring customer satisfaction with Help Desk services will provide you with necessary benchmarks to evaluate customer needs as well as to determine if it is time to improve Help Desk services and communication. Another thing you should always keep an eye on and which will definitely contribute to meeting customer needs is the proficiency of your agents. The metrics for assessing the qualifications and competencies of Help Desk agents and the adequacy of the training provided to the agents is a must for a creditable scorecard. The call abandon rate as well as the response time metric can also be used to measure the service excellence of your Help Desk. Figures do speak louder than words in business after all.

In addition to the above numerical metrics, the resolution excellence metric, i.e. the number of problems resolved versus the number of problems issued and the resolution time metric, i.e. average time required to identify the right solution to a problem can be of much use. The excellence of the program itself behind the Help Desk services is another thing to put to test. Are the predefined solutions for common problems accurate enough; are the solutions the Help Desk provides reliable; are calls tracked accurately - these are all important questions.

A clever scorecard measuring Help Desk performance will embrace both numerical and non-numerical metrics. The common inner characteristic of each and every one of them nevertheless will be one of the dimensions of customer satisfaction since this is the ultimate mission.