You've written before about Help Desks and how hard it is to establish useful metrics [for example "Another helpless desk," Keep the Joint Running 12/17/2007 -- Bob].
My question: What would be so wrong in having a simple metric of the percentage of very satisfied, satisfied, no opinion and dissatisfied users?
- Helpful
Dear Helpful ...
If your goal in running the Help Desk is to satisfy users, that would be an entirely reasonable metric.
This leaves unanswered the question of whether user satisfaction is a well-chosen goal.
If the answer seems to you to be obvious (and affirmative) I think you need to take a closer look.
Here's just one of the complicating factors: Imagine IT had another goal as well -- to increase end-user sophistication. It isn't much of a stretch to anticipate that as end-users become more sophisticated, two things happen: The difficulty of the problems they call the Help Desk about becomes greater; and their expectations of the Help Desk become higher.
As end-users become more sophisticated, the same Help Desk appears to become less effective, even though it might actually be improving.
Here's another reason this measure might not be very useful: End-users care about how well the Help Desk solves their individual problems. They should. The actual priority assigned to incidents, though, should probably be based on their impact on overall business operations. The two won't necessarily have much correlation.
Then there's the "House Syndrome" (based on the television show) - end-users will base their assessments of satisfaction as much or more on how likable the analysts are as on their actual competence.
This isn't to say end-user satisfaction is unimportant and irrelevant. In particular, wise CIOs recognize that the Help Desk has a greater day-to-day impact on the quality of IT's relationship with the rest of the business than any other single factor. So while end-user satisfaction with the Help Desk might not pay the corporate bills, it sure does make the CIO's life a lot easier.
- Bob
Posted by Bob Lewis on April 16, 2008 06:18 AM
