As an IT Manager, you are tasked with developing to measure Service Level Agreements, (SLA), understanding compliance to the SLA and taking corrective action when violations occur. Help Desk systems create significant volumes of “dark data” that, when mined, provide insight critical to achieving organizational service and customer satisfaction objectives.
Let’s look at the types of information you can use to measure service level agreements.
We can consider that there are different reporting objectives when measuring SLAs.
- Customer specific – did we meet our goals?
- Staff centric – how are our team performing and are there any trends that are contributing to SLA violations?
- System-centric – are there patterns in your IT stack that are creating an abnormal trend in SLA violations?
Ideally, you will isolate six to twelve metrics that will help you answer the questions above. Here are some examples for you:
Customer specific metrics:
- reaction time,
- resolution time,
- compliance to agreed deadlines
Staff centric metrics:
- Abandonment Rate: Percentage of calls abandoned while waiting to be answered.
- ASA (Average Speed to Answer): Average time (usually in seconds) it takes for a call to be answered by the service desk.
- TSF (Time Service Factor): Percentage of calls answered within a definite time frame, e.g., 80% in 20 seconds.
- FCR (First-Call Resolution): Percentage of incoming calls that can be resolved without the use of a callback or without having the caller call back the help desk to finish resolving the case.
- TAT (Turn-Around Time): Time taken to complete a certain task.
- MTTR (Mean Time To Recover): Time taken to recover after an outage of service.
We have reviewed what to measure now let’s cover the how to measure aspect.
Of course, if you have a tool that will pull all this data together for you into a single view, then that is the ideal. However, if not, then here are some critical considerations for you:
- Keep the number of metrics small, six to twelve, no more. If you have too much information, it will be difficult to wade through and challenging for anyone to assemble regularly. Too many metrics could lead to the abandonment of this important process.
- Trend the data over a period. I suggest that you have thirteen weeks of data to compare and graph.
- Because you want to see how performance is comparing to the goal, make sure that you put the goal beside the metric.
- Incorporate this report into you weekly team Traction Meeting and use it to identify SLA, team or IT issues. See Six Ways to Strengthen your IT Organization.
Entry Software has been working with IT organizations since 1998 and can help you develop your Service Level Agreements, and provide you with the information you need to measure them. Learn more about their integrated help desk and project management solution, TeamHeadquarters or get a demo of TeamHeadquarters today.