Helpdesk – What gets measured gets improved – ITPN-EP013

What gets measured gets improved – HelpDesk
In today's episode of the IT Provider Network we are going to discuss ways you can improve your service team and specifically your helpdesk by holding your team accountable to some metrics.

Volume – How many tickets are you generating on a daily, weekly, monthly basis
Response – How fast are you responding to and solving customer problems
Noise – What are your ticket types and who are your noisy customers
Production – Who on your team is getting it done and who is playing on their phone

Helpdesk Volume
How many customers, end points, reactive and proactive tickets are you servicing and how is this going to effect your helpdesk.
Number of customers
This is important because smaller customers are much harder to service that fewer larger customers.   You will find as you grow your business you might need to weed out some of the smaller older customers that you have because they will abuse you!

In general, we strive for a customer with 20 users or more and we like them to have 30 users or more.
Number of Locations
Same rules apply – more locations more places to roll trucks too, more internet connections to go down and more network devices to support. If you are supporting many multi-location customers make sure you include a built in adder in your pricing so that you can compensate for these extra costs.
Number of End Points
This might be your #1 determination in your monthly billing. Many MSP’s bill their clients by having their RMM tools report to the PSA the number of agents you have installed in the field and then this drives quantity counts to your agreements which in turn you use to bill your clients.    We use ConnectWise Automate (formally Labtech) and with Automate we have the ability to count and report through the Plugin,  server, workstation, printer, router, other device counts to Connectwise Manage for billing.  We have a mix of clients.  Older Ones that we bill by endpoint but our newer clients are all user based.  This alleviates any fear a client has over extra laptops, tablets or mobile phones.

We’ll take about pricing in an upcoming episode of the IT provider network but we have moved to user based pricing because it seems to align better with what our clients want to measure...headcount.
Reactive / Proactive Ticket Counts
These counts are very important to build and scale your service delivery team and running an effective helpdesk.  Knowing and monitoring your ticket counts is key to correct staffing.

At our company, we track everything in real-time with dashboards and our dispatch portal but we report via our daily huddles on yesterday’s metrics.  We use a combination of Connectwise's Report Writer along with a great third party tool called Brightgauge.

Brightguage integrates with many tools including Connectwise, Quickbooks, IT Glue, BMS by Kayesa, Datto, Continuum, Autotask and many others. Brightgauge allows you to securely import your data, organize and analyze it then create outstanding dashboards scorecards and reports.

Pricing starts at $229 a month and goes up to over a thousand a month, so it's not inexpensive but it is well worth the price.  You can find more information as well as the Brightgauge Podcast at www.brightgauge.com

Getting back to helpdesk ticket counts.   We report # of tickets opened,  # of tickets closed, #total open tickets for ticket volume.   This gives us two data points to make sure we are keeping up with the volume.   Are we closing more that we opened and is the total # of tickets moving down?
Helpdesk Response
How fast are you able to respond and resolve your customer's issues.

At the end of the day, this is one of only two things your clients really care about.  How fast can you solve my problem and how much does your offering cost? If you do a good job at the first one they will care much less about the second one.  But know this,  if you don’t service them well then they will ...