Measure the efficiency of your service fulfilment process by tracking delivery time

A help desk's service process is a blueprint that defines how requests must be processed. It covers everything from how requests must be categorized and assigned to the technicians, to how requests must be worked upon, including the workflow and the steps involved. Tracking the efficiency of the service process is cumbersome and often involves chasing several metrics. A good place to start is looking at your service delivery times.

Service delivery time, that covers the total time between request submission to service delivery, is a good yardstick to measure service process efficiency, and identify problems that may be plaguing your service process. Given the volume and variety of IT requests, it might be time-consuming to look at individual requests in detail. A better alternative is to look at the top 5 service categories with the highest average delivery time. This can help you focus only on requests that have been with the help desk the longest—highlighting the possibility of an underlying problem.

The report shown above can give you some clues into the following help desk problems that might affect your service processes:

1. Request allocation - When certain requests repeatedly record higher than average delivery time, there might be a problem with request allocation. Help desks may fail to update request assignment rules frequently, leading to requests getting assigned to the wrong technician, thereby delaying the resolution. If that's the case, audit your request assignment rules and make necessary changes to ensure requests are assigned to the right technician based on skill, experience, and current workload.

2. Communication and collaboration - Quite often, technicians don't have the necessary information required to process a request. This triggers a to-and-fro mail chain between the technician and the end user to obtain the necessary information, that stretches the overall delivery time. Make sure your query form has the necessary fields marked mandatory; and for requests that might require additional information from the end user, set SLAs for end user responses to ensure technicians receive timely response for faster request resolution.

3. Repetitive tasks - IT technicians often perform certain mundane and repetitive tasks that can delay service delivery. These tasks can be automated to free up resource time so your help desk staff can focus on other critical issues. For example, automatically routing VIP tickets to more experienced technicians, notifying specific support groups when certain keywords appear in requests, or escalating requests to the next level as service deadlines approach. Cross-check your service process maps to identify repetitive tasks and automate those tasks to increase overall delivery time.

IT help desks that don't have any problems are pretty rare. Complaints such as long service delivery time are pretty common—but fixable. Using an advanced analytics tools such as ManageEngine Analytics Plus , you can deep dive into your IT data and discover hidden insights you never knew existed. Go ahead and use this report and the tips listed above to improve your service turnaround time and deliver superior customer service to your end users.

The report featured above is offered out-of-the-box when you integrate ServiceDesk Plus with Analytics Plus. Click here to get started with a free, 30-day trial of Analytics Plus.