Sherlock Holmes has the power of deduction that helps him solve rather difficult cases. If only IT technicians develop this as a habit, they can churn out advanced analytics from simple data. We discussed this in our previous blog post and also the four important help desk questions that can be answered by using simple reports. In this post, we will look another four questions that will help you deduce the hidden business intelligence from your IT help desk data.
Am I prepared for my help desk audit?
It’s always best to be audit-ready, keeping your metrics neat and compliant. One of the best practices of help desk management is keeping your resources and tasks optimized. To check if your team is efficiently handling incoming tickets, create the following report:
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The aging report for in-progress or open tickets clearly tells you the requests that are yet to be resolved, sequenced according to the number of days the tickets have been lying open. There could be several reasons for this. You will be able to view the underlying data to solve the issues. Here are some examples of issues and their solutions.
1. For tickets that lack resolution, you can merge all common incidents and associate them to a new problem for root cause analysis.
2. For tickets that have no response from the end users, you could automate ticket closure if users don’t acknowledge within 24 hours of resolution.
3. For tickets that have no defined SLA, you could formulate an SLA plan with escalations for violations.
In this example, there are around 70% of tickets that have been open for over 60 days, which doesn’t present a very good picture. So these are priority tickets that must be solved at the earliest.
Who are the technicians with best SLA compliance?
Service level agreements or SLAs are critical. Besides helping you automate the timing of the ticket according to its priority, they help you determine which of your technicians are efficient. Generally, a technician who ranks higher on SLA-compliance list denotes that she is well trained. The following chart will help you determine your team’s efficiency.
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In the sample above, Mark has 100% SLA compliance. If Mark could share his best practices with the rest of team, it would certainly boost the team’s overall productivity.
What are we spending our time on?
A service desk encounters two types of incoming tickets and calls: an interruption in the IT service (incident) and a request for service/information. So, for reducing the number of calls to IT service desk, it’s better to know which type of ticket is keeping you more occupied.
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This report tells us that in last 11 months, the service desk spent most of its time on requests for assistance like providing IT assets to end users or even setting up projectors. You can easily reduce these calls by enabling end users to independently use the IT assets and also by upgrading the technology in use. The report also shows that the number of requests for information is dwindling, signifying the adoption of the self-service portal and its knowledge base.
Is my team staffed well?
As the head of your IT service desk, you may sometimes see your team swamped with open tasks. You might constantly wonder about the team’s efficiency and optimum use of resources. However, the reason could be fewer technicians than necessary.
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In the above chart, all technicians have open tasks because there are not enough technicians to close all the tasks. You can monitor this situation, check whether they need any assistance, or decide if you need additional resources.
About Zoho Reports
In the past, you could generate these reports only by writing complex database queries. You don’t have to do that anymore because we’ve introduced Zoho Reports as an add-on with ServiceDesk Plus. Now you can create all these reports in just a few clicks, drags, and drops.
It was the Zoho Reports add-on that helped me build and embed my reports on this blog. If you want to learn more about Zoho Reports , please ask for a personal demo here.
If you have any query or want me to help you build a specific report, please write to me at support@zohoreports.com.
