Statistics for measuring people's performance

[Ravi Sodhi]

Hello! Just a few quick thoughts. In another envirionment although it was usefule to have start and close times. We developed a long list of types of problem communicated by customer vs problem found. We also looked at type of problems by individual. We were able to focus on several problem areas, develop communication collateral and educate customers via FAQs, to help them help themselves - which reduced incoming calls in those focus areas. By looking at problem type, time to clear by individual - allowed us to implement mini training, brown bag sessions to build skills and capabilities in the Helpdesk. It also allowed us to recgnize individuals who clear sets of problems rapidly, this helped their self esteem at being singled out for positive recognition, it also helped establish them as role models within their group to be sought out as mentors or when one encountered problems in a specific area.

The danger of focusing only on time the call came in vs time completed, is that some Helpdesk folks may avoid certain types of problems due to difficulty or handling one large problem made them look bad against a team member who did three problems in same time. Such singular focus can lead to troubled behavior where service reps may hang up on customers due to problem difficulty, thus when customer calls in again they land another rep. You also want to avoid behavior where rep encourages to close out this problem for now and encourages customer to reopen ticket the next day. Such practices make the rep's numbers look better!

Another approach we had used was to capture time to close but add another category around what service did we provide to the customer - mentoring,troubleshooting, faxed document, create custom info that was emailed etc. This allowed us to move groups towards a services orientaton in technical environments. So on a montly, quarterly and annual basis w would proactive communicate to clients and management, the vlaue we provided opr created. ie. we handled 345 service units last month, highest area of call in interest was "printers". Such data allows us to work with problem source to help redesign, improve product, its instructions etc and provides marketing feedback to product or service developers from ease of use, suggestions etc. It also allows us to share with management, team call volume is increasing at 34% monthly, please send more headcount etc.

It is all about running IT as a Business!

[paul courry]

Talk about nailing jello to a wall.................

Everyone around here is expert at managing their statistics and avoiding tackling any problem that might damage them. The favorite technique is to transfer the call to the person making the call in the first place.

I personally think that there is no meaningful method of evaluating performance except by the old fashioned method of getting familar with the person and their work then evaluating them.

BTW, I'd love to hear from HP management their experiences in managing the HPRC and what they have learned.

[Uffe Gavnholt_1]

Hi,

I couldn't help my self thinking about a seminar system as the ITRC is using...

Why not let the customer evaluate the quality of his solution, and measure your employees on the avrg customer rating?

cheers

Uffe

[Neil Shapiro]

Some very interesting metrics mentioned here! I particularly like the idea of whether or not the user was actually helped being a consideration. That, after all, the raison d'etre for a Help desk! One member proposes a survey to users to garner their opinion and that is certainly something that could be pretty easily implemented. However, surveys lead to various problems what with delays in response (or even the fact that most surveys garner well under 10% response rate) or responses that are not well thought out. It occurs to me reading this that most Help desks do track one metric which in many cases could well measure just how helpful that "First Contact" might have been -- the number of repeat calls to solve the problem. Whatever points or measurements are awarded for speedy first contacts and other positives, perhaps a negative value could be assigned to either each repeat call on the same problem -- or to some threshold of repeat calls which would invoke the negative measurement.

[Uffe Gavnholt_1]

It's true an issue will be getting the actual responses from the customers.

I would say a way around it is first of all to let the customer know the consequences of his response. 2nd the engineer will be very interested in making the customer provide his feedback (in case of a happy customer). 3rd it will slip from time to time, but no response must be treated as an avrg, meaning neither good or bad for the engineer.

I havn't seen anyone using a system like this, If anyone has experience with this kind of measure, I would appreciate some feedback.

Have a good day

Uffe

[Terja]

Having being 2nd and 3rd level support for 2 years behind a helpdesk. a better measure would be "how many calls can the help desk answer quickly". If the customers problem is solved in the initial contact, the customer is more satisfied, rather than having to think thru the "oh its just a receptionist" attitude.
Frontline should be allowed the tools and the time to solve the calls. ie. make the max calld duration 2* the time it takes to record the call. probably 5 min per call would be ideal. If at this time the call cannot be actioned pass it. customer will then understand.