Setbacks and Importance of Factors Included in Help desk Metrics

Companies need to invest capital if they are aiming to establish and operate help desk. Firms should always note that facilities, equipment and trained staff, which are all essential to help desk operations, are costing money. One usual and apparent setback is that profits and yields arising from help desk operations are naturally not immediately visible. In some companies, the contributions of help desk to revenues and earnings are not looked at because there would have to be so many other variables involved. Also, help desk' contributions to company earnings are distributed across all important operations.

Usual help desk metrics focus on two main concerns, namely, performance and customer satisfaction metrics. Performance metrics are usually focused at time spent by each personnel for every help desk call. In theory, of course, if time spent with every customer is limited and made short, of course, initial productivity rate is high because that would mean more customers would be serviced within a day. However, looking closely at the situation, you would realize that it should never be the case. If time per call is made short, chances are that the quality is compromised.

Each help desk personnel would surely strive to shorten every call they receive so they can take more calls in a day. In truth, this practice is not advisable because the quality of the calls may be lowered and customers would surely be disappointed. Different customer problems also vary; some problems may take just a few minutes to resolve, while others may take much longer time.

In terms of customer satisfaction as one of the usual help desk metrics, most current practices to gauge customer satisfaction are not effective. For one, effectiveness of help desk services are not directly measurable by sales as there are other factors that influence revenues, like marketing schemes, pricing, demand and price tags. Also, determining the level of customer satisfaction for each help desk call is hard to do.

By simply listening and monitoring calls, which would be costly to do, satisfaction could not be specified. One common technique done by help desk currently is sending emails to customers. The emails contain short survey questionnaires that would take just about less than a minute to complete. Help desk metrics gauging customer satisfaction sometimes are hard to conduct because customers may not be cooperative most of the time.

However, no matter what the setbacks are, companies should always strive to measure help desk performance using effective help desk metrics. Though, patience and perseverance is needed when conducting such an initiative, doing so would be proven a valuable exercise as the activity would surely identify problems and shortcomings not just in the help desk but also to the overall operations of the company.

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