Amid concerns of resource scarcity and increasingly complex resolution processes, service desks are constantly under pressure to deliver more with less. This, in effect, forces service desk managers to drive technicians to resolve requests faster, leading to an unhealthy obsession with numbers.
Several service desks are known to regard the number of requests closed by technicians as a good yardstick for their performance. While this provides significant quantitative information into technicians’ performance, it fails to shed light on the quality of services they provide.
A better alternative is to track technician performance using a combination of several metrics that offer insight into the quantity as well as the quality of services offered. These include metrics that offer insight into technicians’ ability to:
1. Provide satisfactory solutions to end users
Tracking customer feedback is a useful way to measure technicians’ performance. However, most end users tend to skip the feedback collection survey, so a better option is to track request reopens and escalations. This is a far more useful method because when end users are not satisfied with the solutions provided to them, they reopen or escalate their requests.
Visualizing the percentage of requests reopened against the total number of requests resolved by each technician helps gauge the quality of their resolutions against quantity.
A lower percentage of request reopens is a sign that the technician is delivering a better quality of service. If such technicians tend to handle a lower number of requests overall, that’s a small price to pay to ensure better quality.
Similarly, a technician with a slightly lower percentage of escalated requests is far more productive than someone with a higher percentage of escalations, even if they handle more requests on average.
2. Understand and comply with SLA norms
Service-level agreement (SLA) compliance rate is a good benchmark of technician performance because it considers several important factors that indirectly contribute to the quality of the services delivered. These include factors such as the technicians’ ability to understand end users’ problems in relation to business goals and objectives, and provide effective timely solutions that address the problem. Naturally, a higher SLA compliance rate is indicative of technicians’ ability, expertise, and quality of service.
3. Balance workload
Technician performance has a direct relationship with balancing workload. How technicians balance their workload—the number of open, closed, in-progress, on-hold, and resolved requests owned by each technician—is a good indicator of technician efficiency. Tracking workload can help you spot technicians who have relatively shorter wait queues, and resolution time indicative of good performance.
Analysis of workload can help you identify weak links in your service cycle, which you can use to actively address pain points.
In conclusion, when assessing a technician’s performance, it would be erroneous to look only at their number of open, pending, backlogged, or unfinished requests. A better option is to look at the holistic picture, focus on realistic metrics, and recognize technicians for their achievements to further incentivize them to provide quality solutions to end users.
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