The different corporates all use different helpdesk logging systems, whether it’s Remedy, Assyst, Axio or Eden. How you manage your queue from a service delivery viewpoint can be important to the way you manage your team, and their perception to your management and the end users.

How do you manage success and failure within the system?
What measurements are in place?

There are typical ones that are put in place to measure time to complete and quality of workload:

Time taken to complete
Number of times call is chased by user
Number of times call is passed to another team
Number of calls re-opened (not completed as requested by the user)

Typically one person will ‘own’incidents, can we not have someone ‘owning’ requests, often the requests will stack up, when they aren’t that difficult to resolve, particularly if they are the standard kind of thing, create a share on the filer, allocate more storage to a share.

When managing a call queue, there are two key things to think about:

Managing failure
Managing success

Managing failure

Nobody likes ‘failure’ but dealing with it in the right way is crucial, find out why the call was ‘breached’, was it that the call was logged incorrectly, was it waiting for sign off or unable to get hold of the user?
What steps can you take within your world to minimize failure, can you improve communication between the team, you never get the best results from your team through fear, holding people accountable in public. Not in the long term anyway.
Managing success

So the team consistently exceeded the SLA’s appointed to it, how to we reward it? Yes it’s there job, but doing little things can change a working environment for the better at very little cost:

Large box of biscuits?
Round of coffees from Starbucks?
24 pack of diet coke?

Even if it became sort of expected, £3.95 (the cost of 24 diet coke cans) is a very affordable way of maintaining your SLA, maintaining a pleasant working environment and on a simple level showing that the workload is appreciated.