Help Desk: Tools, Metrics and Dashboards

At a recent Help Desk Institute event, Klipfolio staff had a chance to chat with Call Center and Help Desk staff about the daily challenges they face. Here's what we learned.

• They use a mixed bag of technical solutions. You name it, and someone's using it on the Help Desk. Everything from Heat to Remedy to Parature to Excel. And a lot of shops use a mishmash of these and more.
• There is little consensus on what metrics matter most. Is it "first call resolution" that's key? Wait time? Dropped calls? Or something else?
• Old news is no news. Getting information too late was a common complaint. Knowing you've breached an SLA after the fact doesn't help much.
• Help Desk ROI is difficult to measure. The Help Desk is viewed as a cost center. To get the budgets they need to do the job right, Help Desk personnel have to sell themselves. And that means identifying their ROI.

What strikes me about all these challenges is that they are crying out for real time visibility.

How does Klipfolio help the Help Desk? Well, for starters, we tap into each and every source of relevant data, no matter where it's from or what its format, and combine it to tell the whole story about what's happening.

As for which metrics matter, deciding that is Step One in the Klipfolio process for getting customers up and running. Invariably, we learn that different metrics matter to different people. Help Desk managers, workers, and supervisors all have to focus on different things, so they need different Klips in their dashboards.

Of course, it's the immediacy of a Klipfolio Dashboard that makes it so valuable. By providing the right information to the right people in real time, it lets them work in the present. For Help Desk and Call Center workers this means faster response times for increased customer satisfaction.

As for measuring ROI, what better way to do that than to provide management with stats that show how faster response times have avoided those costly mistakes of the past and kept the company's customers and employees happy.

Help Desk is one of many clear-cut cases where a modest investment in operational dashboards can pay big dividends. If you're a Help Desk or Call Center worker, you should really check out what Klipfolio Dashboard for Help Desk can do for you.