Collecting, analyzing, and utilizing IT ticket and contact data can be difficult for IT teams. IT teams get pulled in many directions between maintaining systems, supporting users, and other strategic projects. Yet, this data remains critical to fulfilling IT roles and responsibilities.

This is especially true when partnering with a managed IT service desk provider. IT teams need to receive reports that provide insights into their environment, users, and potential issues on the horizon.

IT Service Desk Reporting

Measuring KPIs provides the insight that enables IT Management Teams to:

  • Balance workloads so highly skilled engineers aren’t spending their days resetting passwords
  • Adjust staffing levels, achieving higher utilization and quality of work-life for technicians
  • Identify areas of need for hardware, software, and training
  • Recognize trends
  • Measure end-user satisfaction

Outsourced IT service providers should enable and enhance an IT team’s capabilities. Regular reporting verifies the efforts of the provider’s team. Positive results help IT leaders justify the outsourced service costs to their superiors. Proactive reporting also enables technology and resource decision-making by the organization’s leadership.

To get the most out of your service provider, IT teams should expect to review these five reports each month:

  • Tickets created and who created them

  • Tickets resolved and who resolved them

  • Customer/User Satisfaction

  • Root Cause Analysis

  • Contacts Report

Tickets created and who created them

IT managers need to understand how incidents flow into their teams. This includes how many tickets the team created, and which support team created them. Did the on-site team have a large jump this month? Were service desk tickets down?

This report assists IT managers in understanding workloads and enables better resource allocation. Seeing a strained service desk coupled with a large, sustained increase in ticket counts can be a justification for hiring more service desk agents.

The opposite is also true. A detailed Tickets Created report highlights teams or resources that are potentially underutilized. IT managers can then take action to better adjust teams to fit their organizations’ needs.

Tickets resolved and who resolved them

To report on the success of their teams, IT managers need good data. Is the service desk or on-site team resolving more tickets? Does the service desk team open tickets, but not close them? A Ticket Resolution Report verifies how many tickets each group resolved.

Ticket resolution data help leadership understand where log jams or weaknesses reside. This report is critical when evaluating a service desk team or an outsourced service desk. A thorough report shows tickets resolved by other teams that could shift over to the service desk.

IT managers can then reduce the load on the other teams allowing them to focus on more advanced issues or strategic projects. Fewer tickets handed off to other teams means a faster fix and a better end-user experience. And everybody wants satisfied users.

User Satisfaction

IT services, and especially the service desk, fall into the service industry. IT teams must keep technology and systems operating so the organization can be productive. End-user satisfaction is a key indicator of not only the effectiveness of the IT staff, but the perception of the IT group within the greater user base.

This is especially useful if the IT team works with an outside partner. This report compiles the data generated through the surveys users receive after their issue has been resolved. A satisfaction report provides a direct feedback link from the end-users to IT.  Is the IT staff, or outsourcing provider, delivering the expected level of service?  Is it performing better than expectations? 

In some cases, the feedback provided may lead to some valuable suggestions that will provide a better experience for all users.

Root Cause Analysis

The Root Cause Analysis report is one of the most important reports IT managers should be reviewed on a consistent basis. This data-driven document should contain a tremendous amount of detailed information about the IT and technology environment. The data leads to insights such as:

  • Where are most of the issues coming from?
  • What are the specific issues user encounter within the problem areas?
  • Have previous process changes had the intended effects?
  • Are service requests or break/fix issues frequently worked on by the IT team?
  • Do you have “power users” that come to the IT team more often than others?
  • Are the issues encountered user error or a system/technology issue?
  • Does the user base need training to avoid adding tickets to the service desk queue?

Once identified, IT Managers can use ‘close the loop’ tactics to address the problems at their source, eliminating recurring issues.

Contacts report

The Contacts Report breaks down all contacts into the Service Desk by the stream type (Voice, Email, Voicemail, Chat, etc) and by a defined period of time.

In addition to the basic contact count metrics, a contacts report also highlights SLA-related metrics like the Average Speed of Answer (ASA), Answer within X seconds, Abandoned Over X seconds, and Average Call Length. This data reflects the end-user experience calling the Service Desk.

This report then enables client stakeholders to justify and verify to their own superiors, using factual data, that the new solution is successful.

A quality service provider should be expected to collect, analyze and present the reporting above, on a regular schedule. Providing a clear picture of the IT landscape to the internal team produced actionable insights. Continuous improvement helps justify the addition of an outsource service provider.

 

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