In an earlier blog post, I introduced the eight KPIs that are critical to every IT help desk. These KPIs help meet basic IT help desk objectives, such as business continuity, organizational productivity, and delivery of services on time and within budget. The previous blog post discussed one of the most important KPIs, infrastructure stability. This post discusses the fourth KPI: ticket volume trends.
Definition: The total number of tickets handled by the IT help desk, and this number’s patterns within a given time frame
Goal: To optimize the number of incidents and service requests and to prepare the IT team to handle the ticket load
What can you do with ticket volume trends?
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Identify peaks and troughs to optimize resource management and technician workload.
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Create a better staffing model.
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Design training sessions for your IT help desk team.
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Analyze service request patterns and plan ahead for purchases of assets and licenses.
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Validate any additional resource requirements.
IT help desks should keep an eye out for a few trends when it comes to ticket volumes, such as discrete spikes and gradual, continuous upward trends. These will be discussed below.
Discrete spikes
A sudden upward spike in ticket volume can be attributed to several reasons such as a period of peak business activity, IT disruptions, post-holiday password reset tickets, or IT rollouts, which can lead to service disruptions or unavailability.
Case study: Fall intake leads to ticket spike at a university
The above figure represents the number of tickets handled by the IT help desk at a university in the United States. The graph clearly indicates a ticket spike in the month of September during 2012 and 2013. This is due to the increased amount of students joining the university during the fall. So, the IT team makes sure that this extra load is distributed evenly across the team, and each member works overtime to handle these ticket spikes.
Gradual, continuous upward trend
An upward trend can occur for any of the following reasons:
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An increase in the organization size
As the business grows, the IT help desk has to support more end users, which typically leads to increased ticket volumes. This gradual increase in ticket volume can be handled by scaling the amount of staff along with the growth of the business and segregating end users into departments and user groups.
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Initiatives to support more business functions
As IT starts supporting more business functions, the volume of both incidents and service requests rises. To manage this, it is important to understand the requirements and expectations of the end users and equip the IT help desk team to handle the increase in tickets.
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A decrease in infrastructure stability
If there are problematic or outdated assets in the IT network, the number of tickets is bound to increase as well. This can be addressed by associating the incidents and problems with the assets, which can help the IT team decide if they should retire assets, upgrade assets, and so on.
If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in the comments section below. In the next blog, we will discuss the next KPI, first call resolution rate. In the meantime, if you are looking for an end-to-end IT service management solution, we encourage you to check out ServiceDesk Plus, the IT help desk software trusted by over 100,000 help desks worldwide.
