Your agents are excited; they will get a new system that they helped choose. Your legacy systems are all tuned up. Now what?
You must determine what you want to do with all the wonderful new data you will have access to with your new system and all its bells and whistles. How do you come up with that?
Ask yourself, and anyone else who is qualified to give an answer, the following questions:
- What are the service goals of the help desk?
- What metrics must be measured to let the help desk know whether it is meeting its service goals?
Once these are defined, it is possible to determine data requirements and strategies.
Data is gathered from both external and internal sources (surveys, call records) to give a clearer picture of customer needs and shape the strategy for service improvement. Gather real time metrics and make them visible to your help desk personnel. This will provide both timely feedback as well as incentive to reach service goals. No longer will your help desk be forced to wait until a weekly or monthly report is issued to see whether goals are being met.
(Data gathering, storage, and retrieval strategies are also important for answering regulatory requirements.)
OK, now we have all this lovely data. What a mess! You need to format some reports so you can make sense of it all.
Reports on system performance can include:
- an evaluation of hardware activity
- security events such as attempts at unauthorized access
- diagnostics of system problems
Reports on help desk performance can include:
- average speed-to-answer
- average handle-time
- call volume with peak and valley
- first call resolution rates
- service level requirements
- metrics on types of calls handled and number of calls abandoned
Reports on customer assets can include:
- version and configuration data
- system status
- network configuration
- service level agreements
Any report you can think of that will help answer the question: how are we doing and where do we need to improve?
Now we’re cookin’ with gas. These reports will let you know where and when the bottle necks are, where staffing needs to be adjusted, how many calls are for simple routine stuff that could have been answered by a self service application. Find out all the things that are holding your help desk back from peak performance. Eliminate them.
Excellent support agent experience nearly guaranteed. Add in training, easy information retrieval; take out the call clutter and install a self service application. Put it all together to make happy support agents.
And happy support agents create excellent customer experiences.