Measuring Agent Productivity

[itilquest]

We are looking for more accurate ways to measure Service Desk agent productivity or ideas on how others measure it.

Below is a list of daily stats given to our agents. The main focus is on Availability time and Tickets logged with the expectation that agents take 20 calls per day/250 a month and have at least 50% available time per day.

Our Service Desk has 1 Tier in which agents work the issue to resolution.
We have some agents out of the queue occasionally working on projects, in meetings or doing call backs so availability time as a measure of productivity may not be the most accurate.

Calls Handled
Avg Talk Time
Tickets Logged
Tickets Resolved
MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution)
FCR(First Call Resolution)
QCR (Quick Call Resolution - within 1 hr)
% Available Time (includes talk time with incoming calls and time waiting for a call)
% Unavailable Time (includes lunch breaks, meetings, project time and call backs)
% Work (wrap up time after a call)
Login time
Logout time
Total Time Logged in

[UKVIKING]

you could stick a gps on the individual to track whether they are going on bathroom breaks and other intrusive / big brother techno means to track their movement. and track them by their work badge

Wait.. is that a little sarcastic .. yes

Instead of micro measuring the Service Desk staff.. who will just work to the micro measure - when morale hits bottom

Use Customer surveys to find out whether the users fidn the service desk usefull and that their incidents are being addressed - ie initial handling, resolution, follow up call

track the number of incidents raised per day by priority and how many get closed by the SD staff (1st line) and by which ones

Analyze the SD staff who close a lot of tickets to see if the tickets are being dealt with properly.. see if that person wants out of the SD and into other areas where their obvious skill for incident resolution canbe used - 2nd line
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[itilquest]

Moral is just fine at our SD.

We do use customer satisfaction surveys, but only for the 1st contact to the service desk per month, however amount of our users now do not have email do not receive those surveys. We now have a survey rating of 4.5 out of 5.0.

But we are also dealing with very long hold times/abandon rates.

Does anyone measure availability or time working differently?

[UKVIKING]

That tells me that there are not enough SD staff to answer the calls
or
the SD staff is doing too much 2nd line support trying to solve as issue vice moving it forward

or

is there something wrong with your ACD system


Having statistics and statistics and statisitics without analyzing the stats

make the stats and the collection thereof pointless
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[UrgentJensen]

Hi itilquest,

You've got most of the standard call centre metrics there, I know you can be even more sophisticated, but it's finding that balance of being clever and maintaining the will to live in the face of a blizzard of statistics.

Statistics themselves do not fix anything.

From what you've written (so far) I think the stats are not really the problem at the moment.

Consider your opening line:

'We are looking for more accurate ways to measure Service Desk agent productivity or ideas on how others measure it. '

What does 'more accurate' mean for you, how has this been defined by your customers? What are you trying to prove or disprove? They're either taking 20 calls a day or not... right? It's possible to get very anal about trying to calculate productivity and waste more time on that than the agents do on coffee breaks.

Remember, you're scoring very highly in your surveys, no matter how large the response, so perhaps your service is actually good enough for now...? (I know, continuous improvement etc., but you get my point right?)

Then you say: 'But we are also dealing with very long hold times/abandon rates' - aha it all makes a lot more sense. So if the agents are hitting their 20 calls per day then they're doing their jobs to a satisfactory standard... so if you're still losing calls then try one/some of the following:

Raise existing agents targets
Fix the call handling process to make it more efficient
Restructure the desk to make a proportion of the agent roles (better to rotate all agents than effectively demote one or two) call loggers rather than fixers so they are available a lot quicker, and release other agents to work on more indepth calls without time pressure.
Buy a better phone system that encourages
Buy a better Service Desk tool that allows, or makes easier email/web based incident logging
Or, worst case scenario, Hire more agents... and maybe sack the statistician to pay for them )

Hope this helps a little,

UJ
_________________
Did I just say that out loud?

(Beige badge)