Looking inside the IT help desk

It is well known that to have a healthy IT Organization, one of the most important aspects or at least one of the most visible ones is the IT Help Desk. The IT Help Desk is the windows to the outside world and your Organization will be measured in a larger fashion by the way your IT Help Desk performs.

The proper functioning of the IT Help Desk function is very well explained under frameworks such as ITIL and MOF. On this post I will mention some of the leading indicators that can be maintained to shed some light into the daily functioning of the Help Desk. (For more information visit the KPI Library).

• First Call resolution rate
  
• Percentage of first-tier resolution of help desk requests
  
• Average number of calls/help desk request per technician
  
• Percentage of closed request
  
• Percentage of overdue requests
  
• Percentage of escalated requests
  
• Percentage of reopened requests
  
• And many more
  

Note: A given time period is needed to measure these KPIs

By monitoring these indicators closely you will be able to better manage your help desk and be in a position to fix any issues that you might have, have an effective Help Desk and keep your customers satisfied.

Also, surveys are much recommended to get the user perspective as to what is the level of service that you are providing, and whether your level of support matches the expected level.
You can measure the Service Level Effectiveness as recommended by Gartner Business Value Model BVM as follows:

Service-Level Effectiveness = Surveyed users with >=90% satisfaction/Total No of surveyed users.

Your goal is to keep this indicator closest to a 100%.

Remember, it doesn't matter how well your Back end infrastructure and systems is running if you have problems with your Help Desk. The perception will always be that IT is not doing a good job. By measuring the above indicators, you will have a day-to-day view of the help desk operations and will be able to adjust accordingly instead of waiting until you perform a Survey to realize that something is not working as intended.