Sherlock Holmes has a unique power – the power of deduction. It doesn’t mean he is an extraordinary person, but just a normal guy who loves to observe keenly and look for details in his object of interest. In a scene of crime, Sherlock can see those details that normally pass by normal or ignorant eyes. When asked, he says “I saw it because I was looking for it.”
To know the right answer, you should know the right question. Same goes for our friends behind the IT service desk. We tend to overlook some important service desk data, because we were never looking for it in the first place. That’s the lack of right questions. Being a technician, it’s pays to have Sherlock Holmes’s keen sense of observation. In this series of blogs, we’ll share some interesting reports and analytics for IT service desk data that will help develop your “inner Sherlock,” answer some hidden but highly valuable questions, and make critical decisions.
Is there a need to renegotiate our SLA?
If you notice that most tickets are beginning to elapse, it is most likely for one of the two reasons: 1) SLA’s are not realistic or 2) technicians are missing deadlines. To find the root cause, you can create the following report and take necessary action.
The SLA Compliance Trends by Technicians report will show you the picture of missing deadlines by technicians. Notice that in the report above, the overall trend of SLA compliance is going up from May through October. It’s a good sign! It means your technicians are getting more efficient.
How are my new technicians doing after their training?
When you have completed the training of new technicians, you must check after a certain point of time whether the training was effective. The Request Resolution Time Trend Report will help to calculate the effectiveness of the training.
A well-trained technician will take less time to resolve a ticket. As you can see in the graph, the overall request resolution time has been gradually going down since the training session conducted in February. Therefore, the training was effective.
Did my self-service portal promotion go well?
Other than a self-service portal (or web form) giving authority to the requester over his or her ticket, a self-service portal also reduces calls to help desk. As an admin, you may have asked end users to start using web form. You may have done promotions such as sending announcement mails, talking to them over the water cooler etc. But did the promotions work? You can find out with this report:
According to the bar chart, the web form is the clear winner among other modes of contacting the IT service desk. But the usage has been stagnant. You may want to push the promotions more to see a surge.
Which are my most problematic sites?
When dealing with multiple sites, the site where most number of tickets are raised can be problematic. Getting to know that site will help you re-configure its details according to the issue found.
In the Top Sites by Open Request report, 38.2% of the open requests are in the NCH site. That site needs attention with respect to the timely ticket resolutions. We can perform a root cause analysis for that site and improve the service.
Ask the Right Questions with ServiceDesk Plus and Zoho Reports
The above reports were created by Zoho Reports, the online reporting and business intelligence application from Zoho.com. Zoho Reports is now integrated with and available in ServiceDesk Plus. If you have updated your ServiceDesk Plus to the build 9028 or above, you have definitely noticed a Zoho Reports icon under the general categories of the Admin tab. (In case you missed our introductory blog on this add-on, Zoho Reports helps create analytics and reports quickly and easily.)
The IT service desk is a pool of important and critical data. All you need is the intelligence to parse the data and get valuable information out of it. The addition of Zoho Reports with ServiceDesk Plus is aimed at making that process quick and easy.
My hopes are that this blog has helped you to see reports as not just pretty charts with numbers, but as an important medium of getting valuable answers for making critical decisions. We’ll come up with more blogs on important reports. Until then, get Sherlocked!
That said, we are conducting a free webinar to walk you through the new Zoho Reports integration and to help you create high impact help desk reports. Click here to get more details on the webinar.
