The rapid adoption of remote and hybrid work models across the globe is disproportionately building pressure on IT help desks—adding more tickets to handle, assets to manage, projects to execute, and a lot more.
A layer of analytical insights over their service efforts can enable IT teams to respond to these changes more quickly and effectively.
The PPP block helps IT teams consolidate, channelize, and streamline their efforts across 3 core areas of the help desk, represented in 3 blocks. Behind the scenes, these 3 areas are interconnected and dependent on each other.
In this blog, we’ve used two business enablers, namely Zoho Analytics and ServiceDesk Plus from ManageEngine, to demonstrate multiple possibilities of extracting insights from your service desk data.
People
People are the most crucial resource in an IT help desk value chain. Effective optimization of this resource can directly translate to effective optimization of service costs. In this setting, analyzing technicians’ workloads can help IT teams identify high and low performers, underutilized staff, overloaded technicians, and much more.
Here we’ve analyzed the number of service requests handled by technicians on a daily basis over multiple weeks. Using the conditional formatting feature, you can easily color-code the number of tasks minus the set target to further analyze performance.
On a particular day, Bruce handled 1 request against Brad’s 3. However, assessing performance merely on the number of requests handled may not give a complete picture—the priority of these requests can be an added dimension. Check out our webinar to learn how to get granular insights by adding priority to the number of requests handled on a daily basis across a period of time.
Process
Reactive to proactive
In today’s volatile market, it’s crucial for IT teams to become more proactive and less reactive.
Request flow, percentage escalations, and average time to respond are some of the metrics we’ve picked that can enable teams to assess the entire service team’s performance. However, how can this analysis drive teams to become more proactive? The answer lies in precisely forecasting these metrics!
By simply asking questions in natural language to our ML-powered AI assistant, we’ve instantly analyzed the average time to respond over the last few months. We’ve also forecasted this metric to understand how it’s going to be in the near future. This can help us proactively mitigate setbacks to ensure a reduction in the average time to respond.
We discussed the impact of request flows on your percentage escalations, and how to forecast these two metrics, in this webinar.
SLA analysis
Since SLAs are not defined by one or two metrics, it’s important for teams to have end-to-end holistic insights. You can consolidate and create a vantage point to monitor all your SLA metrics in the form of a dashboard.
Your SLA KPIs can be captured in the form of widgets, stationed right at top of the dashboard. You can also add more widgets to your dashboard depending on your business needs. Below the widgets are multiple SLA reports that give you everything you need to know about your SLAs.
In our webinar, we’ve discussed drilling into your SLA-compliance monthly trend to further analyze SLA violations by day and department.
Projects
Given the long term effect on your service efforts, projects have become a key area for IT service desk teams. Detailed analysis of projects helps teams spot setbacks, identify training needs, and much more. This can help businesses optimize their service efforts.
Segregating the delayed projects (marked in red) and the projects running on time (marked in green) can be a great starting point. Based on the percentage of completion, resources can be strategically moved to projects that need attention. For example, resources from the QA Automation project can be asked to work on the Conditional Formatting project.
For this demo, we’ve added another dimension to this analysis—project priority. Along with percentage completion, the project’s priority can also be considered for shuffling resources. You can run a similar analysis depending on your business needs.
Summary
The possibilities of extracting business insights from your service desk data using an advanced analytics platform are endless. However, here are the top 3 things you need to consider before investing in a BI platform:
Does it seamlessly work with your existing setup? Learn more about our integrations.
Is it equipped with a robust visual analytics stack for multi-dimensional analysis?
Does it have built-in advanced AI capabilities (like Ask Zia), AI forecasting, and more?
Sign up now to supercharge your IT service desk!
Then watch our webinar on the 5 ways to supercharge your IT help desk with advanced analytics!
Comments