The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/21494
Helpdesk Gurus Leverage Statistics to Provide Better User Support Asking the Right Questions When is the last time you took your helpdesk’s pulse and got a sense of user vitals? How quickly are support tickets being resolved? What are the top ticket categories and why? What effect do major software conversions have on staffing and service quality? What do your users think about the helpdesk, and how satisfied are they? If you are measuring these types of data points, are you actually managing and implementing change based on the data at hand? While gaining access to such data assumes a certain level of internal (or outsourced) helpdesk reporting technologies and software, there’s no excuse for turning your back on benchmark data, which, believe it or not, is now available. Sharing general firm-specific helpdesk benchmark data and statistics with a broader law firm audience was first accomplished as part of the “The Guru’s Guide for Helpdesk and Deskside Support” panel discussion at ILTA’s 2010 educational conference. The session focused on ways to keep the helpdesk motivated, increase user service levels, and utilize call tracking and reporting to enhance the overall helpdesk experience. At the time of the session in August 2010, a substantial collection of firm data, spanning 200,000 law firm helpdesk tickets across a variety of law firm sizes, locations and technology configurations, was provided to help session attendees compare and contrast available helpdesk metrics with their own. A few months later, the data sample was expanded to include 600,000 law firm helpdesk tickets collected and analyzed over a nine-month time frame, and was made available in the updated Guru’s Guide report. Getting the Answers When it comes to basic helpdesk measurements, there’s no more useful starting metric than total support tickets logged by application category. In order to provide more insight into the ticketing source, we compared tickets logged (see bar graph) with the help/service desk (internal or outsourced) versus other members of the IT staff. Over 50 percent of all logged helpdesk tickets belonged to various versions of Microsoft Office; core applications such as Outlook, Word and “Other MS Office” (including Excel and PowerPoint) tools topped the support list. As expected, Office-specific call volumes increased from month-to-month with the total number of Office calls rising considerably in Q3 (July-September) based on an increased sense of firm urgency to upgrade their “bread and butter” applications. After Office, document management system- related tickets were the most frequent, followed by remote access software and PDF tools. Comparatively, tickets opened by non-helpdesk IT members were primarily focused on deskside, hands-on application and hardware issues. The most frequent requests unable to be resolved by the helpdesk pertained to printers/MFDs (toner, ink, paper, etc.), which historically has been the biggest resource drain of any IT department and the most strategic area to outsource. Top Categories — Tickets Logged January 2010 to September 2010 0 Microsoft Outlook Microsoft Word Document management Printer Admin Network Server Document management Desktop PDA Telephone Remote access software PDF tools Other Microsoft Office Laptop Equipment request Microsoft Internet Explorer Hardware Remote access software Operating system Microsoft Outlook Installation Anti-virus, spyware etc Document conversion Timekeeping Microsoft Word Document comparison Timekeeping Operating system Help Desk IT 20000 40000 60000 Peer to Peer the quarterly magazine of ILTA 69