Whether your helpdesk services external customers or internal employees you need to make sure that you have a clear Service Delivery policy that is plainly written and easily accessible to all who have a reason to use your helpdesk.

You may ask what a Service Delivery policy is? Well, it is a clearly defined document that outlines your helpdesk availability and your helpdesk service level priority description. That coupled with a great customer relationship management (CRM) tool will allow you to clearly calculate, define and re-calculate your helpdesk call response times and, more importantly, set clear customer expectations regarding response time.

Let’s first look at service availability. Service availability should clearly outline the hours of operation for your helpdesk and, if anything other then 24/7, the exact times for different regional locations. This should be large and clear, the customer should see this first and foremost and it should be available online, in product documentation, in workplace memorandum and/or via a recording in phone “welcome” message.

The service level priority description breaks down responsive actions by priority. These priorities can be: critical, high, medium, low, none or 1, 2 ,3 ,4 , 5. Then for each priority you would correlate a response time and a resolution time to each priority.

With this type of detailed matrix you can then give customers feedback that their problem is designated- “A level 1 priority and the expected resolution to their problem within 2-4 hrs.” Thus, the customer having seen this breakdown before contacting the help or service desk (because you have made this information available as per the instructions for the service availability information) now has a confirmation to what he expected would be a reasonable resolution time.

Now having outlined clear service response and resolution timeframes you can use the metrics that you capture with your CRM tool (many, many excellent tools are available) to track the following must-know metrics:

• Average time waiting for phone calls to when helpdesk answers
• Percentage of calls solved first time
• Percentage of incidents or service request breaching resolution time targets
• Customer satisfaction

With these metrics you can track whether you are meeting your response time goals and re-define those resolution time response and resolution times as required for your helpdesk, identify where you require more staff or identify choke points in your helpdesk.

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