HDI Member Discussion Room / HDI Discussion Rooms / Process, Metrics and Benchmarking

End User Surveys

blott — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:22:06 GMT

Hopefully someone will stumble across this question and have some ideas for me. I am a Senior IS Tech working the Help Desk at a company in Norcross, GA. My boss and I are disappointed that more people don't fill out the surveys that they automatically receive when their work request is closed. I don't even know if we have a way to determine the percentage of completed surveys, but I know that it is pretty low. The ones that do get completed are almost always very positive, but it's the negative feedback that helps us to know what we are doing wrong so that we can correct it if necessary.

Could it be that we should just consider the lack of completed surveys "no news is good news"?

Brant Lott

Anyone managing a small Help Desk?

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

I work for a healthcare system and manage a small Help Desk. Every month I send the stats to my Director and CIO. This month, the CIO asked how our Help Desk was doing compared to others.

We have 3000 Associates in our health system with numerous systems
We have over 250 outside physicians who have access to our hospital information system (Meditech).
I have a staff of 3 -- all level 1.
Our hours are 7:00 am - 5:00 pm, Mon. - Fri.
After hours support is via duty pager and shared by our field technicians.
We use Altiris for our incident tracking.
We consider our field technicians and systems analysts our level 2 support. If the Help Desk cannot solve the problem, the incident is assigned to Dispatch or to the responsible analyst.

Here is an average month (March):

Calls Offered: 1982
Calls Answered: 1802
Abandoned: 162
Calls to voice mail: 21

I look at answer and abandoned rates for our measurements. I eliminate any abandoned call of .05 or less, but as I read on this board I am way too stringent on that. Our monthly goal is no more than 10% abandoned.

If I have a Help Desk Specialist out for the day, I have no replacement so I run with 2 and I take calls if I have to (in-between all my other duties and projects).

If you are an organization staffed like us and willing to share your data and how you measure, I would appreciate it.

Thanks,

Kathy

(edited to fix the post)

Standard Operating Procedures - A collaborative review approach

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

Hi all,

We have a Standard Operating Procedures document as well as a host of supporting documentation that needs review. Admittedly we have not changed the documentation as we've tweaked processes. We also have gaps in documentation where we've started new "ways of doing things" but have not put it on paper.

I just set up a mail list within our group and have asked for participants to join the list to review existing SOP's and those that have been created to fill gaps. Any of the analysts can join the review list but they have to participate

The idea is that through email, we will take a document and discuss it until a general consensus is reached and a revision is drafted and submitted to the leadership team to review and implement.

It's an above and beyond type of participation as their call and ticket activity should not be allowed to decrease.

The idea spawned from a discussion thread I was involved in recently. I noticed active participation and buy in from those with a vested interest in the process. It was nice to see analysts taking part in their day to day activity.

MY QUESTIONs ARE:

Is anyone currently doing this with their group?
Has this been attempted before and abandoned?
Are there any success stories of how this helped get through the review and provided analysts with a stake in the process?
Any pitfalls to be aware of?
Am I crazy for thinking this up and acting on it?

Customer Call Backs

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

I am looking for some suggestions/direction on Customer Call Backs - reasons to call back (SLA breaches), timing of the call back, questions to ask during the call back, what should be the deliverable from this call back, etc. Our HD supervisor has been given this task without any direction on what upper managment is looking for with this task.

Measuring Service Levels

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

We are currently restructuring our Client Service Desk and are developing the service levels that we will measure our effectiveness by. Any information on what you measure for service levels and what thresholds or target numbers you use would be appreciated.

Service Desk Creating Changes

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

Hi, I am looking to see if anyone else is responsible for opening changes at their service desk and if so, do you track the success rate/error rate for opening these changes correctly? We have a very complex change process and work instructions and though we are opening 93.4% of the changes submitted correctly (we create about 1600 change requests per month) I am being told we need to improve by our change management team. I am looking to see if anyone tracks this so I can get a rough benchmark to discuss with my partners in CM. Thanks.

Call Flow Models or Support Center Organization Structure

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

I am looking for some documentation showing the different call flow models with the pros and cons of each model. We are working to merge 2 technology support centers and any documentation would be helpful research as we develop our new organization structure.

One support center is team structured, with all technicians acting as level 1 support. When level 1 is not able to resolve an issue, the issue is passed to level 2 support technicians which are part of various technology departments. That way the level 2 technicians are specialized, and also utilized for other workload when not acting as level 2.

The other support center is tier structured, with level 1 support passing on only those calls they are unable to resolve to the level 2 team, which is part of the support center.

Thanks for any help you can provide. I've looked for documentation online but so far I'm coming up empty handed!

ITIL Incident Assignment Of Commodity CIs

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

My company is in the process of starting Incident Management in ITIL. Previously, we used the building location as the affected end user for commodity assets (network equipment, cash registers, etc). This allowed for ease of reporting (all tickets for commodity assets for one location belong to one contact record) and avoiding duplicate work (ticket gets reported by two different people over two different shifts).

Since an asset owner's name is tied to the commodity CI record in the CMDB, is it an acceptable best business practice under ITIL to continue using a building location as the affected end user (since many users use the CI) or should the Incident be entered under an individual's name?

I've checked multiple sources but could not find anything. Any suggestions for this situation?

Thanks, Ed Bano

ASA and IVR

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

I'm planning to implement an IVR in front of a client's Help Desk. However, the customer insists on a 30 second ASA. The IVR message may be 15 seconds, which doesn't leave much time.Of course the benefits are to peel-off the easy calls such as Password Reset and Order Requests, and route to lower cost agents. In turn, we would pass those savings on to the customer.What are my options? - Is there a need to ask the customer to extend the ASA to 45 or 60 seconds, while getting lower costs for him and me? - Currently, the plan is to move from 25 expensive agents to a mix of 15 expensive and 10 less-expensive agents. Should I increase the total workforce to, say 27, in order to meet a 30 second ASA, and reduce the cost (but not as much as I would like to reduce the cost).Can you help me think this through?

Surveys - beyond Level 0

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

My Upper Management is requesting that I survey our Second level support to see how the Help Desk is doing on our calls. They want me to find out from them if we have enough information in the calls, do we ask the right questions, are they assigned correctly etc.

Have any of you done any surveys like this? Can you send me a sample? Do you feel it's over doing it for the Help Desk to be surveyed by Level 0 as well as Level 2?

Any help is appreciated!

Bren Boddy-Thomas

VP Membership, San Francisco Chapter HDI

Exchange Bank

Help Desk Operations Manager

444 Aviation Blvd, Santa Rosa CA

email: thomasb@exchangebank.com

Staffing Models

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

I am wanting to compare our current staffing model against other help desks. I have looked on the HDI site for samples of best practices and reviewed the threads in this forum, however, I do not see any recent data with the exception of the ratios/formulas. Does anyone know of industry reports that show best practices for staffing? I would like to see a report or presentation that shows true data.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Angel Chance

angel.chance@bankofamerica.com

New help desk community forum

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

Hi All,I'm trying to start up a new help desk community forum, one that's open to all. There's no registration or ads. I think there's a big lack of community space on the web for the help desk world and this form hopes to be a little start in changing that. You can take a look here:http://www.helpdesktalk.com/

online (web) support

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

I am very interested in understanding and sharing best practices related to providing online (self service) support, especially for internal (intranet) help desk.

Please post to this topic or contact me

Neil Weitz

GlaxoSmithKline

neil.l.weitz@gsk.com

Metrics Status Templates

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

I am looking for a template to publish my quarterly benchmarks. I want something that would only be one to two pages and be visual in nature with little windows for graphs, etc.. I thought I would just see if anyone had anything already created and polished that I could build from.

Thanks,

Sue

Global Consolidations

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

I am working on a project to consolidate all of the Help Desk across GE into a single point of contact providing phone support, chat and self help. I am looking for other large corporations that are either currently doing something similar to this or have considered it. I would really like to learn more about your experiences. If you are willing to discuss it please contact me at bryan.danek@ge.com.

Thanks.

Call Monitoring Measurements

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

Is there a template available or can someone give me an idea of how to quality check calls I monitor in a manner that I can present to an analyst.

I do other quality checking and performance metrics which I can report back to each individual. I offer feedback/coaching on ticket documentation on a monthly basis. In addition I also have a report which is a combination of ACD stats and Incident Reporting Software stats which I give to each analyst on their performance which we discuss individually.

What I don't have is a form that I can use while monitoring a live call. We don't have recording capability due to budgetary reasons. I pretty much have to listen in on calls when I monitor. What do I measure during this call? Or is it basically my taking notes and giving feedback on what I hear. I like to give feedback that can have measurable expectations.

Can someone please offer me

Operational Costs - TCO

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

Hi All,

Does anyone know which elements are included in "operational costs" for a help desk? I was paticularly interested in training costs. Would this be included when calculating the TCO for the Help Desk?

These are the following costs that I am using for my help desk's TCO :

Labor Costs

Temp Services

Wireless phone charges

Repairs

Am I missing anything?

Thanks,

Kathy

Cost Per Call

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

I was playing around with this factor and ran across some questions if anyone can shed some light please.Cost Per Call is taking the total cost of the call center divided by the number of calls coming in (for any given period on both accounts). I assume the lower the number the better. But I run into a scenario in which this is not reflective of issues that may be going on. Now I know that when dealing with a call center you cannot use just one metric or piece of data to judge everything (as many non-call center people like to center on).But if I want to compare say the stats from last week versus this week last year. I simplified the scenario by just taking a look at salaries.Last year:13 technicians @ 8/hr (I know very low..I was working on it)8 hours a day/40 hours a week for eachThat is total cost of $4160We had at that time average call volume of 1400 callsSo cost per call was: $2.97This year:17 technicians @ 8/hr8hrs a day/40hours a weekThat is total of $5440We now have average call volume of 1900 callsSo cost per call is: $2.86We get about 3% of our total end user base to call each week (we support about 50K end users) and over the past year we have not even added 1K in our end user base. So we are up to about 3.75%. And increase in our end user base of of only 2% is increasing our call volume by 25%. Now either those additions are just terrible and call every day or we have had a huge increase in our repeat calls. Futher investigation reveals an increase in our repeat calls. We have had a good bit of turn-over (not just because of money) in the past year. And the lack of training is being reflected by our repeat calls. But usually in most of the metrics you can find some directly relational tidbits to provide indicators...but in the cost per call this is not the case. Looking at the cost per call is a new thing for me to review. But what I am finding is that if a marketing jock takes a look they will think hey..this looks good...costs per call is down. Maybe this is not so much as a question as just an article or something to point out that using one term or indicator is not alway indicative of a problem or performance. But if there is a good way to show this number in the proper light without it getting taken out of context that would be helpful. So any ideas on that would be appreciated.Jerry

Equipment and Standards per Department

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

I would like to establish a standard laptop/PC configuration for each department, but need help developing a form. The idea would be to ask each departmental head to review and sign each form.

Any ideas or suggestions are welcome!

Thank you!

Kathy Lallana - San Fransico, Ca

Call Monitoring Measurements

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

Is there a template available or can someone give me an idea of how to quality check calls I monitor in a manner that I can present to an analyst.

Can someone

Call Monitoring Measurements

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

Is there a template available or can someone give me an idea of how to quality check calls I monitor in a manner that I can present to an analyst.

Can someone please offer

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

My Director has asked me to calculate Total Cost of Ownership for our helpdesk. I don't know what the formula is for this. Can anyone help me out?

I manage 3 technicians who support a user base of 200 internal and 15 remote users. Your help is appreciated!!

Thanks

Kathy

Establishing On-Call SLA

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

Does anyone know what the 'industry standard' is for time-to-response and time-to-action
for on-call support? We are reviewing our On-Call support agreement to include this. We would also like to know what to include in a On-Call SLA.

When is 1 customer a Severity 1???

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

Severity Definition review time again. Anyone willing to share theirs? Does anyone have number of people impacted as part of your Definition? Is one customer in a call center a Sev 1 when that probably represents an external customer who cannot get assistance? Does 1 customer who cannot access your company's website constitute a Sev 1? These are debates that we have going on today. Anyone willing to share your thoughts? Thanks.

Call Monitoring Measurements

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

Is there a template available or can someone give me an idea of how to quality check calls I monitor in a manner that I can present to an analyst.

Can someone please

SLA

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

Has anyone ever run across the issue where the Help Desk Manager and CTO would not like to use SLAs? We currently use Magic TSD 7.0 because they refuse to pay the renewal for the upgrade. We are a small team of 3 techs and 2 network support personnel. What can we do to persuade them to renew or use SLAs?

call monitoring measurements

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

We monitor calls and measure each call on customer satisfaction, ticket docuementation and incident handling (Process). I am trying to establish improvement goals for next years objectives and what goals other people have in place for call monitoring. Our current measurement is based on green, yellow, red coding.

Telephone Service Factor

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

Is this a metric you track? If so, how important is this metric versus other metrics you track?

The common definition I'm finding seems to be calls answered in less than 60 seconds. Do you all agree? Have an alternate definition?

Thanks,
Jason

Ticketing process

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

Wondering what kinds of business rules people have around upgrading and downgrading tickets. And, about reopening tickets. For measurement purposes, does the clock start ticking from the original caller time?

Severity Definitions

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

Anyone willing to share their Severity Definitions?

Ours are:

Email Processing Metrics

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

I have searched the forum and found several discussions on sugestions for how to measure Service Desk/Help Desk associates processing of email when used as a means to communicate requests for service, information, documentation and such. And although I have had my eyes opened to an alternative thought process, that of minimizing email as a channel of requests and providing an alternative of direct request entry via a web based form (I happen to like this strategy a lot for our long term direction) I have not found any useful suggestions on how others are measuring response/process times to emails. If someone has some successful suggestions or strategies for how to effectively and accurately measure the time it takes an email to be processed from receipt to ticket generation I would appreciate the information. In the mean time, I am off to start developing a strategy for implementation of our Self Serivce Page. [Smile] Sincerely, Steven St. Germain Director, IT Support RGA, Inc.

Percent resolved at the following points

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

I am going through the 2005 Practices & Salary Survey and on p.55 "Q32. What percentage of incidents are resolved ath the following points?". The results are split between level 1, 2, 0, Deskside, etc. The total is 113%. Does anyone know why that is?

Call Monitoring Measurements

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

Is there a template available or can someone give me an idea of how to quality check calls I monitor in a manner that I can present to an analyst.

Can

Help Desk Software to Support Software.

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

I've seen a similar post, ("What do you use?" Fred Offenburger) but considering the specifics of my question, I've posted a new thread.

I am in the process of creating a Help Desk that will provide level 2 external support for two software applications that my company developed. The level 1 support, which I'll define as issues that can be resolved by training, or a procedural change, are reported to and resolved by a separate Help Desk, not part of our company. Any issues beyond the level 1 support analysts' ability to resolve will be escalated to my staff. (Level 2 & 3 issues)

Many Help Desk software demo’s I’ve seen have a strong emphasis in internal support, i.e. PC app auditing, inventory, purchasing, - really more hardware centric than software centric.

Do you have any recommendations for Help Desk software that is focused on supporting software as opposed to hardware from a vendor that can also customize the product?

Thank you,

Robert

Problem vs change

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

Is there a definition related to call tracking which separates Problems from Changes and what is the definition of each? We currently consider and track a 'change' as : User access and any upgrade or install of software and hardware where assets must be updated. I am most interested in the standard definition realizing each company's environment may differ slightly. Thank you for your response.

Problem Management - Known Error Database?

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

For folks with a Problem Management Process - Where is your Known Error Database Stored?

Is it in the same database with your solutions? Is it in the same application, but different database? Do agents need to search separately for solutions and known errors?

Where is the proper place to store known errors?

Sarah Huggins
Hannaford Bros. Co.

Standards For Response Time for Email Turnarounds

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

I am a supervisor for a technical support call center that supports the website for an insurance carrier. Our website allows agents to quote and book policies online. Most of our agent contact is handled by phone but we do also handle a number of email contacts as well. I am looking to establish a response time standard for the handling of the email contacts. I am hoping that someone can provide me with any information for known industry standards for handling incidents via email.

Benchmarking

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

I need to create a benchmarking report for my Help Desk. Does anyone have an example of a benchmarking report I would greatly appreciate it. I would like to compare (2004 to 2005) year over year statistics. If anyone know of a good book that would point me in the right direction, that would be helpful as well.

Length of time new tickets worked by Help Desk B4 Escalated to 2nd Level

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

Looking for best practices on how long a new ticket is worked by a Help Desk Specialist before being escalated to a 2nd level group. Has anyone implemented any time "limitations", and if so, what are the limitations and how is it working for you?

Thanks -

How long to wait to cloas ea call

pmcdavid — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:16 GMT

I have a tier 2 desk that receives tickets via assignments in a problem tracking system. The Tier 2 agents do not get a "warm" transfer of the caller, they only get the trouble ticket (this process can not change). They are to call the user back to begin the troubleshooting process. I want to limit the number of attempts the agents make to reach the end user, allowing the agent to close a call after x number of attempts. Does anyone have a suggestion as to how many attempts would be reasonable?