Five types of reports a service desk manager needs

[#1]

Businesses today are more data-driven than ever. While most efficient service desks today have Jira ITSM (ITSM) software in common, an effective agile reporting tool that builds on top of Jira and collates information will maximize the benefits of Jira ITSM for service desks.

A service desk manager is responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of a service desk; they are also responsible for identifying and diagnosing issues and problems; categorizing and recording reported queries. They are also responsible for providing solutions and supporting problem identification, advising users on an appropriate course of action, monitoring issues from start to resolution, and escalating unresolved issues to a higher level of support.

There are many metrics they can rely on to help with their tasks, like customer satisfaction levels, ticket closure rates, ticket status.  But, beyond these, we've narrowed down the five most important metrics, purely from an ITSM operational perspective, that a service desk manager must track to measure, analyze and improve service desk management. 

Open Tickets by Assignee 

The Heat Map report is an inclusive report that gives users an overview of all open tickets, team members assigned per ticket, and the duration of the last status update, divided into five time-values and ticket status. 

This report gives insight into three critical areas that affect the overall performance of the service desk team:

1. It allows the service manager to have better visibility about ticket status progress.

2. It allows service managers to recognize the causes behind long-timed tickets, thus better understanding how to upsurge ticket turnover.

3. It helps allocate workload fairly among team members.     

Number of Open Ticket Daily

The Line Chart report is a qualitative report that gives service desk managers an indication of the total number of open tickets daily.

In this specific report, open tickets are new requests received and are still "in progress." These are not tickets that are resolved, canceled, moved to the product backlog or are pending or closed. This report allows you as a service desk manager to understand the time response of your team to address issues raised by customers. 

First Time Response

The first response time or (FRT) is a measurement of the average time it takes for a customer service agent to respond to an original ticket raised by a customer. 

Whether incident management, problem management, configuration management, among others, this report calculates the time difference between ticket submission and first response.

Traditionally, the goal of the service desk team was to keep the FRT as low as possible. However, with automation and bots, customers know their tickets are received. As such, an accurate representation is the 'Wait Time' or the time it takes for a service desk agent to start working on a ticket.

This metric allows visibility into capacity planning issues or processing issues filtered by the time of day, days or weeks when the FTR or Wait Time is low.

Median First Time Response Report

The Median Report is a measurement report.

This report gives service desk managers the possibility of pulling out tickets dating back 30 days and measuring the median first response time. Then, as a service manager, you can correlate between issues and response time, minimize time gaps, and increase your team's productivity.

Agent utilization

Agent utilization measures the ratio between work done by a service agent to their capacity to understand staff productivity. This metric is also critical to determine the cost per ticket.

While work and capacity are subjective, tracking and reporting on agent utilization is essential for strategic capacity management, reducing burnout, and budget allocation.

Tracking these metrics will become a lot easier with the help of a custom time tracking and reporting tool that integrates seamlessly with Jira ITSM. IT service desk reporting offers many benefits, but they can only be visible if you are clear about why you need the reports. In addition, a defined goal improves the reporting experience, not just for the betterment of the service desk but also for enhanced stakeholder management.

[Rob_Huntley_Tempo]

A good service desk lives and dies on their SLA metrics.  Time to Respond and Time to Resolve are key.

One other KPI I think is really important, especially for Service Desks that work with paying clients, is the CSAT score.  Resolving the issue is important in a timely manner but you can't ignore the customer experience.

Great article, thanks for posting.

[Cass Clark]

how do you create a report of created and resolved tickets between a customised date range?  I used to be able to do this using jira in cloud, now it's on prem, it appears you are governed by set metrics, last 7days, last 30days etc, therefore I cannot run a report on a previous month as I could using the cloud service.