Pink President's Blog

How Can There Be A #1 Metric For Service Desk When There Are 3 Primary Criteria For Success?

In our collective desire for quick fixes and easy step-by-step solutions I’m reading more and more every day about metrics for Service Desks, and particularly how to identify the most important metric of all. Well times change, of course, but I think our overall view for what makes good service hasn’t altered since we first paid serious attention to this important business function well over 20 years ago.

To illustrate my point, I can’t helping drifting back to the early days of Help Desk Institute when Malcolm Fry and myself were co-presenting sessions on call handling, problem solving and trying to get people to think of “service” instead of “systems” (In fact Malcolm’s original books - that pre-dated ITIL - were called “The Service Culture”, constituting a set of 4 volumes: “Help Desk”; “Problem & Change Management”; Service Level Management”; “Quality Control & Assurance”). And it was at the 2nd HDI Conference in San Diego in 1991 that we first introduced the idea of the “3 Rs” for Help Desk service quality:

1. Response (answer the request for help quickly)
2. Resolution (fix whatever’s wrong)
3. Respect (do both of the above in a way that left the customer feeling happy about the way they’d been treated)

That’s it. There wasn’t - and still isn’t - a third R (or anything else) to worry about.

Do whatever you do; do it promptly; and be respectful the whole time.

So if that’s what’s at the heart of good support service - you’re need metrics to measure each of those. In the early days it was:

1. Speed to answer the phone (3 rings?)
2. Resolution rate (75%+?)
3. Some kind of “satisfaction rating” (8+ out of 10?)

Fast forward to 2009 and now we’re a lot more sophisticated in what we support, and how. So the metrics are more precise and varied, but they still come down to the “Three Rs”. so there can never be a single, overall measure - you gotta start at least at 3!

1. Hi David
   Those three are really important and useful measures but I think there is one measure “to rule them all”.  The single measure is “market share” by which I mean what is the Service Desk’s share of the support needs of their user community. My guess is that majority of Service Desk managers do not know how they rate on it.

   I have done some surveys in Finland for my customers and so far the results have been rather suprising, meaning that the market share is very small, far below 50%. People ask their friends and colleagues and call Service Desk as the last resort. There seems to be a lot of room for improvement.

   Aale

   Posted by Aale Roos  on  11/09  at  11:49 AM
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