Host your Help Desk Balanced Scorecard Metrics on Excel
Yes, you already know how a great Help Desk team can propel your business to greater heights. In your company, you already have the best help desk team supported with the best help desk software like those provided by 8x8. But, do you know how much it costs your help desk team to serve one client? Do you know your help desk customer satisfaction rate? What about the first contact resolution rate of the help desk team? Are your help desk agents well utilized? What is the level of satisfaction among your help desk team? What is the average speed of answering customers’ calls?
You won’t know or answer most of the above questions unless you have a robust help desk scorecard in place.
What is a Help Desk Balanced Scorecard?
This is a performance monitoring and evaluation tool that takes the most important help desk metrics --such as the cost per ticket, customer satisfaction, and first contact resolution rate-- and merges them into a sole, overall measure of performance. When followed over time, the Help Desk Balanced Scorecard informs you if your help desk is improving, staying unchanged or getting worse.
Creating Help Desk Balanced Scorecard
According to Jeff Rumburg, the co-founder and managing partner of MetricNet, the process of creating help desk balanced scorecard metrics includes the following steps:
Identify the metrics you would like to incorporate in your scorecard. This will vary depending on the metrics your service desk tracks. For instance, you may include; cost per contact, customer satisfaction, first contact resolution rate, agent utilization and agent job satisfaction. This will vary depending on the metrics your service desk tracks.
Create a weighting for every metric grounded on its relative magnitude in the scorecard. This is purely judgmental, but it’s suggested that you overweight cost and customer satisfaction because they are the base metrics for service and support.
Determine a practical range of performance --worst scenario to best scenario) for each metric. These performance scales are normally developed from a benchmark of your service desk.
- Key in your performance for every metric into the fifth column.
- Apply the interpolation formula to compute a score for each metric.
Multiply the metric weight by the metric score to establish the balanced score for each metric. Add the individual balanced scores and you have the total balanced score for your help desk.
Hosting Help Desk Balanced Scorecard Metrics
Having help desk balanced scorecard metrics is one thing. Hosting the help desk balanced scorecard metrics is another. Some companies have wonderful and well-thought help desk scorecard metrics. However, they have hosted the scorecard metrics on Excel.
Hosting help desk balanced scorecard metrics on Excel is not a bad idea. Actually, it is the most convenient platform when you are just starting your business. But as you grow, you will need to host your help desk scorecard metrics on platforms that are scalable, reliable and intelligent.
What are some of the Scalable, Reliable and Intelligent Platforms for hosting your Help Desk Scorecard?
Cloud hosting of your help desk balanced scorecard metrics is the best. Majority of the enterprises host their help desk scorecards on cloud platforms such as 8x8 Virtual Service Desk. The cloud platforms have the following benefits:
- Flexibility and Diversity: cloud platforms are flexible and have diverse features that enable you to improve the quality and productivity of every employee interaction while reducing your operating costs. Cloud platforms provide the rich functionality of an on-premises solution, but without the maintenance headaches and hidden costs.
- Remote access: the innovative and 100% SaaS delivery model supports help desk agents irrespective of their location. Whether in-house, remote, or home-based all that is required is a phone, an Internet connection, and a web browser. These truly on-demand capabilities allow you to quickly scale your operations up or down as your business needs change.
- Integration capabilities: the integrated phone, email, and chat provide multiple avenues for employees to request support while allowing you the flexibility to get business insights in the most cost-effective manner.
- Developer’s APIs: some cloud solutions such as 8x8’s Virtual Service Center have API feature that allows for easy integration with leading ERP, travel software or other internal applications. This enables you to deliver a personalized support approach because the agent has immediate access to the whole information about the customer. Again, using the API, you can edit your balanced scorecard metrics from time to time.
- Friendly user interfaces: the great user interfaces and system flexibility enables you to maintain your help desk environment without breaking a sweat. You do not need dedicated IT staff either.
- Security compliant: Because the scorecard metrics are hosted on the cloud platforms, which are mostly compliant to the government security protocols, you do not need to worry about the security of your data.
Conclusion
Choose a world-class help desk and SaaS technology solution and focus on what's important: growing your business. Call 1-877-800-7136 or fill out the form below to request a no-obligation quote from an 8x8 product specialist.
