Solving the mystery of help desk request reopens

Everyone loves a good mystery. There's just something irresistibly engaging in uncovering what's been concealed. However, when it comes to your help desk, mysteries can be nerve-racking. Take request reopens for example. Do you know why so many requests were reopened this month, or last month? Solving this mystery should be the primary focus for any help desk manager because too many request reopens means customers are not happy with your services, and unhappy customers are not good for business.

One area you can start looking into is, first contact resolution or first call resolution (FCR). Quite often, technicians who are pressed for time mark requests as "resolved" without fully addressing the issue reported. This results in frustrated customers who then reopen the requests. Finding out how many of your reopened requests were marked as FCR will help you spot if this is happening in your help desk.

Given below is a report created using Analytics Plus comparing the total requests reopened against the number of FCR requests that were reopened.

This report clearly establishes that of the total requests reopened, about 50% of them were resolved upon first contact. It further shows that requests marked as FCR are often not up to the standards expected by the customers, hinting that help desk technicians need to focus on the quality of their responses.

Catching such issues early on can greatly benefit the help desk and help improve customer satisfaction.

Creating the report:

To create this report, you will need the following aggregate formula.

Percentage of FCR requests that were reopened

100*(countif("Request"."ReOpened"='Yes' and "Request"."FCR Marked"='Yes')/countif("Request"."ReOpened"='Yes'))

Once you've created this formula column, populate your axes as given below:

X-axis: Created time (month and year)

Y-axis: Reopen request count (Actual)

Percentage of FCR requests that were reopened (Actual)

To explore more interesting reports and dashboards, check out our online demo. You can also log in as an administrator and create your reports using our sample data set.