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Grading Helpdesk Tickets

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by antijamsect

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I have a bit of a problem. My manager has asked me to come up with some criteria and a form to grade the helpdesk on their tickets. I was recently hired as a "helpdesk coordinator" however, this is my first job with any type of management responsibility, and I am not sure how to approach this.

My manager is not being at all helpful, the list of criteia that I made and showed him, he thought was "good." All he says about anything is it is GOOD.

So my problem is that I have no idea how to weight the critera, how to make an appropriate grading form, etc. etc. I mean I have been doing helpdesk for 3 years, I know what is a good ticket and a bad ticket, I just dont know how to quantify it.

Any suggestions? Or sample grading sheets would be so greatly appreciated. Thanks!!!

2 replies

by gralfus

1. Was the call resolved or did it have to go to a technician? (training, permissions)
2. Was the call closed prematurely?
3. Was the customer treated well or treated badly?
(attitude, language)

Do you see a trend in the type of calls that are not being resolved? If so, perhaps some training is in order, or some other approach. Listen to the helpdesk techs as they may be frustrated at the lack of information/response from IT groups/etc. In other words, just because the helpdesk wasn't able to help doesn't mean the problem lies with the helpdesk.

Often the people calling the helpdesk are virtually helpless when it comes to computers. It can be very easy for a tech to get frustrated with such people. They have to remember that the users are not truly an inconvenience, but the very reason why they have a job.

by infosec engineer

Be sure that when you develop your metrics that you take into account how well documented the ticket is. The better documented it is the easier it is to redress in the future if needed and the ticket can be used to create a Tech Bulletin for your internal (or external) knowledge base if there are a sufficient number of calls on the subject.

I have used a metric of time vs documentation for this purpose where there should be at least 1 commment for every 2 minutes on the call at a minimum. A well documented call might have 3-4 comments per minute of call time. This evens out over the length of a call since you can type comments while the 'customer' performs a task for you or you are talking to a Tier 2 or 3 Engineer. Thus you have a scale of 1 to 3 with 3 being well documented.

Other items to track:
---------------------
Did the HelpDesk Tech confirm:
-- System Type - Make/model, OS, RAM, Application, The "actual" issue, etc.

Just my thoughts after managing an IT Program (including HelpDesk) for 6.5 yrs in a 99.999% Up-Time environment. Of course, these metrics are just the tip of the iceberg and you need to determine what metrics are most important for your environment. When weighting them, determine the order of precedence for the metrics and then adjust the number scale accordingly. If it is very important use a 1 to 10 scale where as you might use a 1 to 3 scale for a less important item. Thus your scale provides your weighting automatically when adding up the score

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