It’s said that metrics tell a story that can be used to manage anything, but old operational metrics no longer tell the story we need to tell.
The widespread adoption of flexible work has brought many changes to workplace operations. The increased complexity of supporting diverse work environments has placed a high demand on support personnel and significantly changed the employee experience. IT agents are fast to leave their current job to seek more fulfilling, less-stressful opportunities, leading to lower retention rates for technical staff.
Managing the employee experience requires metrics that measure the entire employee lifecycle for both IT and business employees, including the onboarding process, ongoing employee and agent satisfaction, and the ability for IT to deliver services cost-effectively.
For each set of metrics, it’s important to slice and dice the numbers across several demographics, including business unit, location, remote vs. in-office, and employee type (full-time, temporary) to ensure consistency across all groups. By combining demographic information with process measurements, leaders can spot improvement opportunities and improve the employee experience and retention rates.
Look for ways to optimize your agents’ time
Onboarding your agents to your IT tools can be time-consuming and costly. On top of that, IT is responsible for onboarding employees onto the tools and systems they need to do their jobs, which is a big project for IT in a digital-first world. Monitoring KPIs around onboarding will help to improve the process overall, satisfaction and as well as reduce ticket load for IT.
Over the past three years IT has not only seen a spike in issues, but a growth in complexity of issues adding to the resource strain. To move the IT organization forward, IT leaders need to start measuring the number of problems being resolved at scale before they are reported. This long tail investment will start to free up resources.
Track these KPIs:
- Onboarding satisfaction for agent
- Reduced ticket load for IT during end user onboarding
- Incident prevention (number of problems resolved at scale)
Track agent satisfaction and combat agent turnover
Prior to the pandemic, the IT industry was already facing an aging and retiring workforce. The last few years along with the “great resignation” has only acerbated the issue, resulting in even more turnover and a significant increase in demand for talent. IT leaders today need to stay ahead of that turnover risk and frequently measuring job satisfaction is a bellwether metric.
IT leaders also need to be acutely aware of who is picking up tickets to ensure there aren’t any team members being overburdened. Not only can keeping an eye on your agents help lower turnover, but having happier agents also often results in higher quality work and can raise all other KPIs.
Track these KPIs:
- Technician job satisfaction
- Turnover rates
- Ticket volume by agent
Keep an eye on your end user experience
In the blink of an eye, first impressions that last a career are made, and the onboarding process creates that first impression. But in a hybrid world, where not all employees are starting their company journey in an office, a rocky end-user experience can result in a poor first impression, low productivity ramp, and additional IT tickets for your team.
You can also start to track customer effort. This has been a key metric for call centers and tech support centers who provide customer support. IT teams should think about adopting this metric, especially since support teams have become more remote and steps away from the employee. As call centers are aware, remote troubleshooting can put undue burden on the end user to find support, wait for it, and be out of a device while the technician is troubleshooting.
The business value of this approach is simple: the cost and business impact of finding, training, and retaining employees in a volatile environment is increasing, while retaining them is a far more effective way of keeping a competitive edge.
Track these KPIs:
- Onboarding satisfaction for end user
- Ticket escalation during the onboarding process
- Customer effort score
- And then segment these KPIs by audience/location
Find more IT budget by measuring cost and value
With tech sprawl increasing and employees bootstrapping tools to solve one-off problems in pockets, it can be hard to stay on top of all the licenses and tools being used. IT leaders need to both get a handle on the technology being used to centralize and remove redundancy and then start to closely monitor license usage to eliminate unnecessary overspending and conquer IT complexity.
Track these KPIs:
- Software redundancy
- License utilization
- Total support cost per employee
Business value of the new metrics
Instead of just looking at the operational metrics like first call resolution and mean time to resolve incidents, which place added pressure on agents who may already be feeling burned out, the KPIs above focus on creating a positive employee experience and increasing retention – both for your IT agents and end users. While it’s a big task, it doesn’t have to be a big investment, especially when you are also measuring ways to save and simplify.
As you strategize how to improve these metrics, consider GoTo Resolve. It consolidates multiple tools into a single, secure platform – like remote monitoring and management (RMM), remote support, camera sharing, and helpdesk ticketing – and is easy to use, quick to learn, and made to fit small and midsize business (SMB) budgets. Learn more about how GoTo Resolve can help.
