Metrics & KPIs - IT Help Desk & Customer Service

Why are metrics/KPIs important for the IT help desk and customer service organizations?

Increase Customer Satisfaction - Excellent help desk leaders understand root cause analysis so they can take systemic steps to reduce overall call volume and increase customer satisfaction. They carefully measure not only the call type, but also why calls actually occur. Leaders determine the underlying reasons behind customer inquiries. This has to be extremely well understood in order to decrease call volume and ultimately increase customer satisfaction.

Highlight Relative Performance – Excellent help desk leaders draw key distinctions between the performance of people and groups for objective incentive programs. Linking incentive programs to subjective criteria will destroy morale in any organization. Without objective measures, favoritism, personality and politics rule instead of performance. Circulate the name(s) of winners along with a copy of the report(s)/metric(s) documenting why the they won and how everybody else performed. Can’t improve if can’t measure! Increase individual and group morale with metrics.

Internal & External Benchmarking - Excellent help desk leaders benchmark their companies against the industry and direct competitors for continuous improvement and call reduction. Easy to get industry data, but need to collect data about your company with your call tracking system to compare with industry data.

Financial - Excellent help desk leaders measure performance to generate resource allocation plans, balance workloads, balance headcount and make business cases for capital and operating expenses. Tie your team’s performance to revenue as much as possible. How many revenue producers did the support organization kept productive? How happy are out customers so they keep on buying?

Everyday you have to show the world you’re smart, competent and deserve your paycheck every 2 weeks. Metrics can help you keep your job, dept. headcount & budgets. A business case is needed for resources…no better way than with metrics. Objective data will dictate most decisions in today’s economic environment.

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