Service desk data under valued

Joint research by SDI and Freshworks reveals that only 38% of service desk teams provide businesses with context on data.

Friday, 4th January 2019 Posted 5 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Freshworks, a global leader in customer engagement software, has published the results of a business metrics research project suggesting that businesses aren’t gaining full value from their service desk data. The joint research ‘Measuring and Making Most of Service Desk Metrics’ provides insights into what metrics organizations are measuring, how often they produce reports and what they do with the data.

The project, conducted by Service Desk Institute (SDI), found that only 38 per cent of service desk teams provide context with the data they collect. This indicates that service desk personnel are only being evaluated on specific metrics instead of providing value back to the business. Further, more than half of businesses – 55 per cent – say they don’t find their service desk metrics useful or valuable at all.

Other key statistics from the report include:

Only 35 per cent of service desks can report on their metrics in real time; 54 per cent of service desks report weekly, while 80 per cent provide monthly reports
27 per cent of businesses spend between four and seven hours a month collating metric reports, while 25 per cent of businesses spend more than eight hours a month collating metric reports
Only 17 per cent of companies measure cost per incident

“The ability to report back on service performance is essential for all companies. Customer engagement is so important for ongoing relationships, and a poor support experience can harm your future. At the same time, service teams can provide great insight into why customers respond in specific ways. If you don’t provide that complete picture around service back to the business, you are missing out on great opportunities to improve,” said Simon Johnson, Freshworks general manager UKI.

The SDI report, “Measuring and Making the Most of Metrics”, was commissioned by Freshworks and authored by industry analyst Scarlett Bayes. “SDI’s Global Best Practice Service Desk Standard places a great deal of importance on managing information and performance results. Service desks which seek to achieve the highest level of maturity are required to measure multiple metrics, provide data against relevant targets for at least a year, and show that this data is analysed with commentary. This may seem a formidable task, but it shows the importance of metrics and how valuable they can be,” Bayes said.

Alongside business context, the research report looked into how service desks report on their own performance and results. According to the report, only 34 per cent of respondents measure service desk employee satisfaction. In an age in which a positive office culture is a priority, this is a concerning figure because it can impact productivity, customer experience and retention within the business.

“If people within a team are dissatisfied, this can negatively impact team morale. It’s important to think about issues like job satisfaction and mental health, as this helps to make service teams feel more valued by the rest of the business. Alongside improving team morale and retention, happier agents provide better service and increased performance,” Johnson said.

To increase awareness on the importance of talking about mental and physical health, Freshworks has launched an online and social campaign called #KeepingITFit. This targets service desk agents, managers and other stakeholders to make changes to their working lives, priorities and objectives in order to maintain and improve service quality and mental health.