It is now acknowledged that a service desk software helps you handle the ever-increasing customer requests and demands but it is not a ‘set up-forget it’ element of the company. It represents one of the public interfaces of the company and to maintain its good health requires periodic assessment and review is needed. This review goes beyond a few standard metrics like KPIs that are baseline measures of service desk health. A range of factors such as metrics, service ticket workflows, incident trends, service desk bottlenecks, resource distribution, and even customer perception need to be assessed.The health of the service desk can be understood from these metrics but at what point do you raise the red flag. Some pointers here
Resolution of less than 80 percent of incidents at the first point of contact is a cause for alarm and it reveals a lot about process health. Industry figures reveal that about 40 percent of service desk professionals don’t measure metrics but about two-thirds of IT organizations manage to resolve 80% of incidents at first contact. At less than 80%, this metric reveals underlying issues that may be causing bottlenecks or otherwise negatively affecting service workflows. Similarly, a consistently low first call resolution (FCR) rate points to an ineffective reassignment process or a gap in agent training. With a customer support help desk that provides incident management and AI as a solution it is possible to handle such situations.
The organization needs a system that ensures a detailed knowledge base, the means to manage it and provide service agents with the relevant customer information. As the business grows, it is important to place the knowledge and customer information in a centralized platform that your help desk can use to address recurring issues.
A Configuration Management Database (CMDB) with all relevant information can be used to consolidate disparate data sets and be a current and accurate source of information about data within an organization.
Missing the target resolution times repeatedly points to a service desk bogged down by systemic problems. My prescription for such issues would be to comprehensively identify, address, and prevent reoccurrences of these issues is by getting down into every component of the resolution workflow. It could be a certain type of request with an unduly long resolution time, or of workloads distributed unequally. I remember reading elsewhere that about 76 percent of IT organizations frequently miss their target resolution times and how they could have avoided it by using dynamic SLA management and AI that are available in industry leading solutions.
It is important for customer service metrics to reflect the business impact accurately and many a time, better automation capability could do this job. A help desk support solution for a growing business needs to reduce the tasks that employees must handle by automating tasks like routing and managing tickets, assigning severity levels, viewing response rates and metrics. Such features simplify the process for the team, leaving them to focus on serving customers. This helps organizations detect and address critical issues and is hence valuable given that only 57 percent of critical issues are identified by companies before they impact business.
Service Desk for Customer Support can identify and address these problems before major damage occurs, spot recurring pain points and help neutralize high-impact scenarios. Solutions with agent performance and dashboard features, some that can also integrate with active directories or HR databases can be a guarantee in these challenging areas.
