March 29, 2024

CX Master

Service Matters – Learn What Works!

Why Your Company Needs a Tech Support Scorecard

Having a tech support scorecard can help you improve your overall team efficiency and effectiveness and can also directly contribute to customer experience.

For leaders of technical support teams, a tech support scorecard is a great way to evaluate how your tech support team is performing. If you’re not familiar with a tech support scorecard, I hope that this post will provide you with the knowledge you’re missing, but simply put, it’s a tool that helps you measure your team’s performance against the metrics that are most important to your organization.

A tech support scorecard can be useful for a wide variety of teams and isn’t just restricted to technical support teams (although you might want to change the name). You can use the principles provided here with help desk teams, customer service and support teams and even internal IT support teams.

With a tech support scorecard, you can quickly assess your team’s performance and identify opportunities for improvement. When you’re evaluating your tech support scorecard, here are some metrics that can be helpful:

Support Scorecard – Quality

Measures the quality of the customer experience. Quality metrics include customer satisfaction, NPS scores, customer complaints, and other metrics that indicate how well your team is meeting your customers’ needs. Quality metrics that are non-numerical are harder to come by as they require more manual work. However, they can be extremely powerful in improving the underlying customer experience being provided.

  • Training – an area that I like to include in the quality section is the training and skills that an employee has gained or has demonstrated. If your tools allow you to use skill-based routing capabilities, having this understanding is essential.
  • First Call Resolution (FCR) – Another metric that should be considered under quality is First Call Resolution (FCR). This metric measures the percentage of calls that are resolved during the first call. In some ways this measurement feeds into the training measurement as having an understanding of FCR can help to identify gaps or deficiencies within the team.

Support Scorecard – Quantity

Measures the amount of work your team is doing. Quantity metrics include the number of calls, tickets, or requests your team is handling, as well as the amount of time your team is spending on each call, ticket, or request.

Quantity measurements are generally easier to compile using most case management and telephony systems. However, it is important with quantity measures to ensure that you do not simply look at the number of cases being handled, but how many of these are “returned” and require rework. If your support team is a revolving door where the team is constantly redoing work, your efficiency will plummet as will your response times.

  • Mean Time to Resolve (MTR) – MTR measures the average amount of time it takes to resolve a specific case. This measurement can be useful in identifying your team’s efficiency, as well as in identifying specific individuals who may be taking too much time resolving cases.
  • Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) – MTTR measures the average amount of time it takes to resolve a recurring issue. This is especially useful in identifying any patterns that may be causing problems for your customers.

Quality vs. Quantity

It’s important to measure both quality and quantity. While measuring quality is more difficult, it allows you to ensure that your team is providing the best customer experience possible.

By measuring both quantity and quality, you can ensure that your team is providing the best support possible while also identifying opportunities for improvement and training.

Creating a Balanced Scorecard – Looking at the team

Gathering all of the data is great, but what happens next? This is where a balanced scorecard comes into play. In creating a balanced scorecard for your tech support team, you should focus on metrics that are most important to your organization.

Many leaders have copious amounts of data, but they do not put that information into context. They understand the average speed of answer but aren’t really able to talk about how well the team is performing from the point of view of the customer and the business.

A balanced scorecard helps provide an integrated picture across the organization. It helps talk about how your teams performance impacts the bottom line and gives you a quick snapshot view on whether or not your team is improving, remaining static or degrading.

This is an excellent tool to help give the SLT an understanding of what is working well, so we’ll explore this topic in more depth in the future – from the point of view of leading teams, a balanced scorecard is less useful.

Creating a Scorecard for the Employee

While building a scorecard from the team point of view can give you a large, holistic view of the support department as a whole, how do you manage your individual employees?

This is where the employee scorecard comes into play. Hopefully, your leaders and managers are already providing regular feedback to the people within your organization? If they aren’t doing that yet, then that absolutely needs to change.

Those feedback sessions should not just be a touchpoint and a discussion about the weather. Rather, they need to provide useful, actionable information to the employee that they can use to improve and grow.

  • With an employee scorecard, you can tell your employees how they are doing, where they are excelling, and where they need to improve.
  • Regular feedback sessions help you keep employees motivated and engaged, as well as provide an opportunity for you to identify and address any issues that may be impacting performance.
  • Employee scorecards should be specific to the individual employee and should include information about how they are doing against specific measures that are relevant to the employee or to their role.
  • Team measurements should be included from the point of view of comparative analysis. as that can help motivate and inspire the employee.

Measurements within your team are essential in ensuring that you are doing a good job. However, if these measurements are not shared with your employees, they won’t know what they need to focus on to get better.

Having individual employee scorecards that are discussed regularly are an excellent tool for aligning performance with annual reviews and salary improvements too! If regular sessions are held to discuss performance, these conversations tend to be a lot simpler as there are no surprises.

About Author

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I am an ITIL Expert and extremely passionate about customer service, customer experience, best practices and process improvement. I have led support, service, help desk and IT teams as well as quality and call center teams in Canada and the UK. I know how to motivate my teams to ensure that they are putting the customer first.

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