Use analytics to keep premature ticket closure in check

A common complaint from end-users is that technicians, sometimes, prematurely close tickets without fully resolving them. The underlying reason could vary depending on the business scenario. Some of the common reasons are — Unexpected surge in number of incoming tickets, or technicians handling requests without fully understanding the end-user's issue.

Premature closing of tickets has serious implications for the help desk; it could escalate costs, decrease productivity and in the long run, make users lose confidence in helpdesk technicians. But how do you track such requests?

One way to do that is by looking at the reopen rate. It gives you the number of requests reopened after being marked closed. Reopen rate can be represented as,

Reopen rate = (Number of reopened requests / total number of requests) * 100

For eg., if you have 30 reopened requests and 100 requests in total, then your reopen rate is 30%.

A pragmatic approach would be to look at the reopen rate for each technician (as shown below). High reopen rates indicate premature ticket closures and unhappy customers.

From the above report, you can see that the following technicians have the highest request reopen rate: Bruce Waters, Brad Gessup, Lynn Hendricks, Joe Williams, Frederica Watson, and Steve Wilson. But before you decide on an action plan or take corrective measures, you need to consider a possibility: What if one of these technicians handled an unusually high number of requests during the said period? In that case, it would be natural for him to have a higher count of reopened requests as compared to others.

To eliminate this possibility, you can build a report (given below) that compares the total requests handled by each technician versus their reopen rate. This will help you identify and eliminate outliers.

From the graph above, you can see that technicians Brad Gessup and Steve Wilson, have both handled considerably more requests (123 each) than the other technicians. And, it would be safe to remove them from your list of technicians under scrutiny.

Reopen rate is one useful metric to look at technician efficiency and measure end user satisfaction. Also, it provides a more direct approach to look at technician's competence and productivity.

To build the above reports, fill your fields as given in the images below:

Report: Reopen rate by technician