Most Desktop Support organizations commit two major mistakes when it comes to performance measurement: 1) they do not track the right KPI’s, and 2) they do not exploit the full potential of Desktop Support KPI’s as a diagnostic tool. Here are 5 important Desktop Support metrics to measure and monitor.Technician UtilizationJust as world-class desktop support groups are obsessive about maintaining high customer satisfaction levels, they are equally committed to keeping their costs in check. They do this primarily by maintaining tight control over technician utilization. This has the effect of helping to minimize cost per ticket. Keep in mind, however, that other factors besides technician utilization will have an impact on the cost per ticket. Chief among these is the travel time per ticket, which can be quite high when supporting a customer base that is widely dispersed geographically.The formula for determining technician utilization is somewhat complicated. It factors in the hours in a work day, break times, vacation and sick days, training time and a number of other factors. But there is an easy way to approximate technician utilization without going to so much trouble. Download the formula here.Customer SatisfactionThere are almost as many different ways to measure customer satisfaction as there are service desks that track the metric. I have seen surveys that contain as few as one question, and surveys that contain as many as 40 questions. I have seen multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, and interview style surveys. I have seen scoring systems that offer as few as two choices per question, and as many as twelve choices per question. The result is that customer satisfaction has the greatest variability of any metric. Learn more about this critical metric.Mean Time To ResolveInasmuch as customer satisfaction is driven by MTTR, many desktop support organizations take steps to manage and minimize this metric. Although the user population density, and hence the travel time per incident cannot be controlled, other factors affecting MTTR can be managed. These include maximizing the first visit resolution rate (comparable to first contact resolution rate at level 1), and routing desktop technicians in real time. This latter technique allows an organization to manage the incident queue by dispatching technicians based on the proximity and geographic clustering of incidents rather than on a first-in-first-out (FIFO) basis, as is common in the industry. Read more.Cost Per TicketIn general, incidents require less time to resolve than service requests, so the Cost per Incident is almost always less than the Cost per Service Request. Since the Cost per Ticket is a weighted average of the Cost per Incident and the Cost per Service Request, the mix of incidents and service requests will strongly influence the Cost per Ticket. Learn to calculate this metric here. % Resolved Level 1 CapableEvery ticket resolved at desktop support that could have been resolved by the level 1 service desk represents a defect in the support organization. You can estimate the cost of these defects by multiplying the number of defective tickets by the cost of resolution at desktop support. Click here for four suggestions for minimizing the % Resolved Level 1 Capable.How do I use this information?It is absolutely critical to communicate the overall performance of desktop support, and the balanced scorecard does that for you. Think of the balanced scorecard as your letter grade for the month! In this way, desktop support can track its overall performance, and, in any given month, may see costs go up or customer satisfaction go down or mean time to resolve increase, but these individual measures take on a secondary level of importance because the balanced score provides a more complete and accurate picture of overall desktop support performance. Click here for a simple six step process to create your desktop support balanced scorecard.Are these metrics the be-all and end-all for my Desktop Support organization?No. There are other metrics you should be tracking and trending regularly. Download our whitepaper “Eight Essential KPI’s for Managing Desktop Support” to learn more. For a more comprehensive overview into Desktop Support metrics, download our eBook “Introduction to Desktop Support metrics”.
