IT Support Metrics Roundup

IT Support Metrics Roundup:

A Year in Review

By Jeff Rumburg

For the past year, I’ve been breaking down one key performance indicator (KPI) for the service desk and/or desktop support in one issue of the Industry Insider e-newsletter each month. I’ve defined each KPI, provided benchmarking data, and discussed key correlations and cause-and-effect relationships. These are the KPIs that really matter to support organizations, and I hope they’ve provided actionable insights you can leverage to improve your organization’s performance.

First Level Resolution Rate

First level resolution (FLR) is a measure of a service desk’s ability to resolve tickets at level 1, without having to escalate the ticket to level 2 (desktop support), level 3 (internal IT professionals in applications, networking, the data center, or elsewhere), field support, or vendor support. But first level resolution is not to be confused with its close cousin, first contact resolution. Among other things, first contact resolution is a quality metric that strongly affects customer satisfaction, while first level resolution is a cost metric that strongly influences total cost of ownership for end-user support.

As 2012 comes to a close, let’s take a quick look back at the year in metrics.

As a ticket is escalated and resolution moves further away from the level 1 service desk, the cost of resolution increases (see the table below for average cost per ticket in North America). Furthermore, these costs are cumulative. If a ticket is logged at level 1 and then escalated to level 2 (desktop support) for resolution, the average cost of resolution is not just $62, but $62 plus $22, for a total of $84. The clear implication is that any ticket that can be resolved at level 1 should be resolved at level 1, and that maximizing FLR is the  equivalent of minimizing TCO!