Monday 17 May 2010

Service Desk Statistics – Practise What You Preach

For more than 15 years Richmond Systems have been developing service desk software and advising customers on best practise for their service desk implementation. But how does their own service desk perform? Chris Ware from Richmond Systems answers this question.

“We use SupportDesk to record, classify and action incidents and requests raised with the support team. We’ve configured automated email responses as these are a useful way of reassuring Customers that we have received their requests and are working on them, especially in the case of requests logged via email or the web – customers’ hate being left in the dark.

We use service level agreements (SLAs), which are applied automatically when an incident is logged and the priority of the incident then advances until a resolution has been achieved. The technician is notified as the priority escalates and at pre-defined thresholds the team leader is also notified. Together these techniques help to ensure that Response SLAs are met.

Another visual feature that works well for us is to colour code the incident by the time since the incident was last worked on or the incident priority. This capability, combined with the use of automated escalations and notifications, means that an incident or customer should never be left without relevant information.

SLAs and response targets are analysed using reports from the Web Reporting module; these enable the service desk manager to effectively manage the team, set targets and objectives to improve customer service. Reporting back to senior management shows the current status and progress of outstanding incidents raised. All reports are scheduled and delivered via email to the relevant people at the right time.

So we certainly practise what we preach - are we any good at it? We naturally I’m biased so I’ll let the figures speak for themselves:

  • Response success rate year to date: 95.8%
  • Proactive incident reduction of 81% in the past 12 months
  • Average customer satisfaction rating of 4.2 out of 5
We use this information to set future targets and improve our technology. Best practise requires continuous improvement and we are certainly not going to rest on our Laurels!”