The Service Desk

Monitoring the process

The best measure of the success of a Service Desk is customer satisfaction, although this is not the exclusive responsibility of the service desk.

It is important to try to set up well defined metrics with which to measure the performance of the Service Desk and the perception users have of it.

Progress reports should include points such as:

• The average time taken to respond to requests sent by e-mail, phone or fax.
• The percentage of incidents closed at the level of the first line of support.
• The percentage of queries responded to in the first instance.
• A statistical analysis of the incident resolution times organised according to their urgency and impact.
• Compliance with the SLAs.
• The number of calls handled by each member of the Service Desk team.

Another important monitoring task is that of overseeing the level of customer satisfaction. This can be achieved by means of surveys allowing the customer's perception of the services provided to be assessed.

You could opt to close each incident or query with a series of questions allowing the customer's opinion about the attention received to be gathered, along with his or her satisfaction with the solution offered, etc. All this information should be compiled and analysed periodically to enable the quality of service to be improved.