susheel777
Programmer
I have a question on metrics for technical support. What sort of metrics would I use to measure the quality and efficiency of my technical support team?
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Metrics for Technical Support
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Would think you'd have to start by figuring out what kinds of things you do the most of like hardware installs, hardware repairs, software upgrades, user support so-on. A review of things they do within each of those categories would probably suggest things to measure.
Also why you're doing it may suggest some direction.
Is this for your information, or is it necessary to justify the department, is it for your superiors, is there a real interest or is somebody just playing buzzword bingo, and so forth?
I don't know if Data Processing/IT has places you can find benchmarks for things. If they don't, then you'll probably have to build an internal history of what you want to measure for several months and just look at trends. Repeat calls for the same problem could be one measure. Time is something I'm used to thinking about, but that could be a real problem in what you're looking at because easy problem/hard problem, communication skills of tech person and user/and relative technical knowledge and intuitive insight of tech person and user in relation to issue at hand.
I don't know how to quantify things like supporting well written software vs bad stuff, knowledgeable users and unknowledgeable users.
Also why you're doing it may suggest some direction.
Is this for your information, or is it necessary to justify the department, is it for your superiors, is there a real interest or is somebody just playing buzzword bingo, and so forth?
I don't know if Data Processing/IT has places you can find benchmarks for things. If they don't, then you'll probably have to build an internal history of what you want to measure for several months and just look at trends. Repeat calls for the same problem could be one measure. Time is something I'm used to thinking about, but that could be a real problem in what you're looking at because easy problem/hard problem, communication skills of tech person and user/and relative technical knowledge and intuitive insight of tech person and user in relation to issue at hand.
I don't know how to quantify things like supporting well written software vs bad stuff, knowledgeable users and unknowledgeable users.
you have to set levels for type of machines or software if its a pc it was around $150 - $200 for parts and time was good because that is one part and hour to put it in and hour for diags
servers had more money to it like 800 to a 1000 in time and parts (we used cheap clusters avg per machine was around $12,000)
I liked to base it on (avg cost of parts + 2 or 3 hours of labor on hardware )
and software programing was hours in house was more time then third party programs
and coprate wide problems was in it own group it was more based loss of production
gunthnp
Have you ever woken up and realized you where not alive.
servers had more money to it like 800 to a 1000 in time and parts (we used cheap clusters avg per machine was around $12,000)
I liked to base it on (avg cost of parts + 2 or 3 hours of labor on hardware )
and software programing was hours in house was more time then third party programs
and coprate wide problems was in it own group it was more based loss of production
gunthnp
Have you ever woken up and realized you where not alive.
Hi Susheel777:
I have some experience in the management of a technical support group. I think it is important to have an SLA, or Service Level Agreement, which will quantify the support duties. You set target turn around times on sets and subsets of activities, and measure success againt this.
Of course, you need buy-in from the user community and the technical support area when setting acceptable turnaround times, as well as some sort of method of tracking.
A less 'measureable' method is to periodically poll the user community for feedback in the form of on-line survey's etc.
What i find is that your rarely get unsolicited favourable feedback, however, when you go after the information, you will be surprised at the number of users who are satisfied. It is also true that no news is good news, and if you have problem tech support staff, your users will generally let you know.
In terms of actual metrics....that depends on what support duties you handle. If you handle alot of hardware repair, your metrics will be detailed in this area. If you do more software trouble shooting, you will need to breakdown the severity of the problems etc...in order to come up with meaningfull SLA catagories.
You also need to tie in the responsibility of the user in the process as well. For instance, if you are waiting on the user to provide critical information to proceed with the support, you need a way to track this so that it does not reflect poorly on your support staff.
Hope this helps a bit...
I have some experience in the management of a technical support group. I think it is important to have an SLA, or Service Level Agreement, which will quantify the support duties. You set target turn around times on sets and subsets of activities, and measure success againt this.
Of course, you need buy-in from the user community and the technical support area when setting acceptable turnaround times, as well as some sort of method of tracking.
A less 'measureable' method is to periodically poll the user community for feedback in the form of on-line survey's etc.
What i find is that your rarely get unsolicited favourable feedback, however, when you go after the information, you will be surprised at the number of users who are satisfied. It is also true that no news is good news, and if you have problem tech support staff, your users will generally let you know.
In terms of actual metrics....that depends on what support duties you handle. If you handle alot of hardware repair, your metrics will be detailed in this area. If you do more software trouble shooting, you will need to breakdown the severity of the problems etc...in order to come up with meaningfull SLA catagories.
You also need to tie in the responsibility of the user in the process as well. For instance, if you are waiting on the user to provide critical information to proceed with the support, you need a way to track this so that it does not reflect poorly on your support staff.
Hope this helps a bit...
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susheel777
Programmer
Thank you all for the really helpful comments. We're trying to find some way to measure the effectiveness/quality of our tech support team's output and the suggestions given definitely have given me some place to start. Cheers!
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