How are you keeping tabs on your internal helpdesk? Are they performing to industry standards?

An easy score card to assess whether your help desk is measuring up.

When it comes to keeping track of your IT help desk’s performance, deciphering how well your internal team is doing might be hard to understand. First and foremost, how can a user know if a problem should take so long to resolve? How can you gauge that an issue is being adequately addressed? And when does someone else need to intervene?

These are all great questions—in fact, questions that businesses like yours have asked me a lot. And because of that, I’m writing a post to help you evaluate whether your help desk is meeting up with expectations. Whether they’re performing above industry standards and doing so in a cost effective way.

So let’s dig into some key performance metrics to understand whether your IT team is cutting it:

While the average help desk may track over 25 metrics, these are the 6 that we’ve identified as the most important to evaluate whether your help desk is really working well. The principle is quality over quantity—if your tech department is inundating their tech reports with filler.

• Cost per Contact—do you know how much each user’s ticket costs your company? If you’re overly satisfied with the service, attentiveness and response of your helpdesk, then you might put a very high price on each ticket—if not, you might cringe at how much each ticket costs! Regardless, you should be in the know when it comes to understanding your helpdesk spend.
• Customer Satisfaction – do your users provide feedback after a ticket was closed? How do you know if they’re happy with the helpdesk you currently have? If you don’t track how satisfied users are with your helpdesk service, you can’t have a good idea of how much an asset (or liability) they are to your organization.
• Agent Utilization—is your tech team completely utilized? Can you account for the time your helpdesk is actually working on user issues? Tracking utilization is crucial to determine whether it makes sense to have an internal helpdesk.
• First Contact Resolution Rate—Known by many names in the industry, first contact resolutions represent how effective your helpdesk is at solving your user problems. A high first contact resolution rate (typically 70%) represents that your help desk has a dearth of technological knowledge (either personal or well-documented knowledge) to support your users. Remember, the more first time resolutions represents more of your users being able to get their work done.
• First Level Resolution Rate—how many of your tickets get closed from Level 1 people. Level 1 represents entry-level technicians that have basic knowledge, but might not have sophisticated deep knowledge for hard-to-fix problems. If the majority of your tickets fall within the capacity of a Level 1 technician, you really need to assess your whether you’re over spending for the help you’re getting- level 1 problems should be easily fixed by most any IT hand.
• Agent Satisfaction—how happy are your helpdesk employees? Are they happy helping users? Do they run out of the door when the clock hits 5? Understanding whether or not your helpdesk people are satisfied with their work can speak to whether your company should consider an alternative helpdesk solution.

Experts have identified these seven metrics to represent 80% of the value you obtain from your IT help desk.

But even more, you need to be tracking your metrics and comparing them. Specifically, someone in your company should update someone in the C-Suite with the following information:

• Track trend performance consistently over time.
• Benchmark your helpdesk support with industry standards—I would recommend you comparing your internal helpdesk to a customizable outsourced helpdesk solution.
• Diagnose and understand underlying problems in your helpdesk—I’d recommend you taking a look at how to perform a root cause analysis for helpdesks.
• Prescribe actionable tasks to improve helpdesk performance.
• Ensure that helpdesk goals are being achieved on a quarterly basis.

It takes serious work to effectively run a good help desk. And a part of running a well-oiled help desk is making sure all of their ducks are in a row—that you and your users are satisfied with their service and that they have the resources at their fingertips to get their work done.

But do you really have the time to make sure the appropriate metrics are being tracked? And how can you really audit your helpdesk system? Contact me today for a helpdesk audit today.