Reports You Should Expect from a Service Desk Provider

Collecting, analyzing, and utilizing IT ticket and contact data can be difficult. IT teams may not prioritize leveraging data when they focus on maintaining systems, supporting users, and completing other strategic projects.

However, it’s important to remember that proper data analysis remains critical to maintaining a smooth, efficient and strategically sound service desk strategy. 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 and users— and any potential issues or risks on the horizon. 

Service desk KPI reports 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

The right outsourced IT service partner will enable and enhance a given IT team’s capability by providing data-driven support and justifying it with ongoing reporting. 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.

5 Reports You Should Expect from a Quality Service Desk Provider:

1. Tickets created and who created them
2. Tickets resolved and who resolved them
3. Customer/User Satisfaction
4. Root Cause Analysis
5. Contacts Report

In this blog, we’ll give an overview of each type of report, and how they can support the success of your IT service desk.

1: Tickets created and who created them

This type of service desk report assists IT managers in understanding workloads and enables better resource allocation. It includes the quantity of tickets created, and which support team created them. Seeing a strained service desk coupled with a large, sustained increase in ticket counts can be a justification for hiring more service desk agents.

Additionally, it can also pinpoint recent trends that can help point to strategic staffing decisions. Did the on-site team have a large jump this month? Were service desk tickets down?  The opposite is also true.

A detailed Tickets Created report highlights teams or resources that are potentially under-utilized. IT managers can then take action to better adjust teams to fit their organizations’ needs.

2: Tickets resolved, and who resolved them

To report on the success of their teams, IT managers need data that proves the kind of work that is being accomplished. For example, 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 team resolved. Ticket resolution data helps 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. 

3: User satisfaction

IT services, and especially the service desk, can be considered as part of the service industry. IT teams must keep technology and systems operational — not only for productivity, but for literal functionality.

However, 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 outsourced IT service desk partner.

A user satisfaction report compiles the survey-generated data that users receive once their issue is resolved. These service desk reporting metrics provide a direct feedback link from the end-user base to the IT support team. In some cases, the feedback provided may lead to some valuable suggestions that will provide a better experience for all users.

4: Root cause analysis 

The root cause analysis report is one of the most important data sets IT managers should review on a consistent basis. This report should contain a tremendous amount of detailed information about the IT and technology environment within a given organization. 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, service desk managers can use ‘close the loop’ tactics to address the problems at their source, eliminating recurring issues.

5: Contacts report

The contacts report breaks down all contacts into the service desk by the stream type (voice, email, 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:

• Average speed of answer (ASA)
• Answer within X seconds
• Abandoned over X seconds
• Average Call Length.

This data tends to accurately reflect the end-user experience when contacting the service desk and is inclusive of a wide variety of communication mediums and styles. By bundling this data into a contacts report, an organization can more easily prove that a new solution or approach is successful.

Reporting For Success

Gathering data and analyzing may seem like a cumbersome task at first, but the benefits of a great reporting system are undeniable: You have proof at your fingertips that will justify ongoing strategic decisions that can really benefit your organization.

Whether you’re already working with a trusted service provider, or seeking a new one, keep this list handy as a “litmus test” for the kind of quality and efficiency you want from your partner-provided solution. You’ll be thankful for the security and empowerment that this kind of data will provide to your organization, its leaders, and their strategic decision making.