VUCA is the perfect descriptor for today’s work world: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. IT teams struggle to support diverse work arrangements and locations, increased automation and complexity, and external threats to computing security. Support needs have changed as employees are working from new environments or starting work remotely, and the toolsets agents use have expanded, frequently resulting in a cobbled-together tech stack that requires them to navigate multiple systems to solve an end user’s problem.
Measure your way to easier
There are several metrics IT can measure to understand this new world and improve their response, leading to happier support teams, more satisfied employees, and greater executive confidence. Start tracking these KPIs to get a handle on how complex IT support is for you today and use them to start simplifying and ultimately gain more control.
Make onboarding easier
The paradigm for how onboarding is accomplished has changed. New hires may not be coming to an office on their first day – or ever, for that matter – so onboarding must be handled remotely and at the same high service level as office-centric processes. They need their equipment, software, and access provisioned smoothly, or else it can result in a poor first impression and low productivity ramp.
Employee onboarding satisfaction
Measuring their satisfaction with the process can ensure that the organization is meeting the new employee’s needs. Onboarding satisfaction surveys should be delivered at several intervals during the first 90 days: one week, 30 days, and 90 days, to gain a solid viewpoint into the employee’s journey.
During the first-week survey, interest will be on whether they had everything they needed to begin working, providing solid feedback to IT on their onboarding support processes. The 30 and 90-day surveys look at their ongoing satisfaction with the job and the ongoing support they receive. Questions that assess customer effort and net promoter scores become more appropriate in these latter surveys.
Ticket volume & escalation during onboarding
On the other side of the onboarding process, think about your agents too. The complexity of onboarding has caused many additional IT tickets and heads.
During the first month on the job, ticket volumes may be high as new hires settle into their role and obtain everything they need. Measuring ticket volume per new hire and the percentage of tickets escalated provide an essential way of gauging the support they receive. These numbers can be lowered over time by defining role-based provisioning standards and automating as many aspects of provisioning and initial support as possible.
Make support easier
One way to lighten the load for your agents is to reduce the number of break-fix tickets coming in that they must react to. To move the IT organization forward, IT leaders should start measuring the number of problems being resolved at scale before they are reported.
Incident prevention
There are two aspects of incident avoidance; one concerns shift-left opportunities where self-service provides the ability for new hires to gain the information they need, while the other is a measure of IT’s ability to work proactively and scale operations. Problems resolved at scale represent a measure that quantifies the positive impact of proactive maintenance, repairs, and equipment replacement before failure. The metric tracks the number of tickets that resolve issues before an incident is experienced.
There are several benefits of this approach:
- Working to resolve issues at scale leverages remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools combined with automation to open tickets for devices that require attention. This enables technicians to focus on proactive work rather than reacting to incidents that have already occurred. This evens out the agent’s workload and helps relieve stress.
- Large-scale maintenance activities like vulnerability patch management can be performed with automation, securing the enterprise and lowering the likelihood of large-scale cyberattacks.
- As incident rates are lowered, employee or external customer satisfaction increases, making the efforts to automate device management a win-win. Info-Tech Research Group indicates that 44% of business leaders feel that IT doesn’t have an operational strategy that supports the business and cites failure to work proactively as a key reason. When IT struggles at the operational level, business confidence in their ability to execute strategically lags.
Make your tech stack simpler
With more and more tech sprawl and the common practice of employees bootstrapping tools to solve one-off problems in pockets, it can be hard to stay on top of all the license and tools being used. This creates a more complex environment for IT to support, one that can expose businesses to greater security risks. In fact, 43% of businesses see their biggest challenge in detecting and remediating threats is an over-abundance of tools.
Software redundancy
- Redundant software can lead to duplicate records and inconsistencies across systems, rendering data untrustworthy. This can complicate troubleshooting and repair times, especially when dealing with device configuration information.
- The number of tools an agent uses can impact their mean time to resolve by forcing them to navigate across multiple platforms to solve a simple problem. Bringing their work into a single console reduces complexity and improves agent experience.
- Software consolidation lowers annual maintenance and licensing costs, while working with one vendor can greatly reduce administrative time and associated costs.
License utilization
- Measuring the number of licenses per tech can identify teams that use redundant toolsets, helping consolidation efforts.
- Tracking licenses by the application – both for the IT team’s tools and the software used by the company at large – can alert managers to opportunities to reduce the number of seats purchased, thus lowering operating expenses.
The value of this approach
These metrics represent a new approach for many IT organizations supporting a more complex working environment. Rather than focusing only on operational statistics, they look at factors that affect the executive opinion of IT’s strategic capabilities and their value, employee experience, and efforts to control operating expenses. Given the complexity of the hybrid work world, they provide a far more strategic view of IT’s overall effectiveness and the value they provide to the organization.
Are your IT tools making your job easier?
As you track these KPIs, consider how your IT tools support your goals. Check out GoTo Resolve, the all-in-one IT management and support platform that gives agents an easy way to respond, act, and resolve issues – all in one place.
