How to Use Help Desk Data to Improve IT Ticketing System Management

Tickets are flying in. You have to reset your system’s server for security purposes. Your director needs a report on recent support tickets. Someone needs their password reset – again. You’re just too busy. 

You ask yourself a lot of questions about how to make your job more efficient. Will taking the time to analyze help desk data be important then?   

The answer is yes – your ticket to improve your IT ticketing system management may be lying in your data. 

 

What help desk data should I be measuring?  

There are specific types of help desk data. Listed below are some of the most integral to know what’s happening across your help desk center and where there’s room to improve, automate or even minimize help desk requests. 

• Ticket volume trends are probably one of the most crucial data points giving you insight. Ticket volume trends give you visibility into the total number of tickets coming into your department and what trends are developing. When looking through your data, look out for spikes in ticket volume. You will be able to determine issues that are causing large trends in volume, such as service disruption, business activity peaks and even wide-scale software bugs.  

 

• First call resolution rate tells you the percentage of your ticket requests that were resolved within the first interaction. Essentially, this can indicate how complex your tickets may be, how educated your analysts and specialists are, and how often items have needed to be escalated. This will point to education opportunities and how you may be able to empower your team members to own and execute more during their exchange with ticket stakeholders.  

 

• Lost business hours will be an extremely important metric to keep an eye on to gauge how much you need to push for efficiency in your team’s output. This will track the true loss and impact on business from your help desk. Many will look at service availability instead, but do not realize that lost business hours will actually show the overall performance. Keeping this to an absolute minimum will be key and you will want to make sure you dedicate a high level of focus to working toward this goal.  

 

• Change success rate is a positive metric in contrast to some of the others we have been highlighting. You don’t want to solely focus on where things go wrong. Look at how successful your current processes are to celebrate your wins also. Making this available to your help desk staff can be a huge boost to morale and production. 

 

• Maintaining your Infrastructure stability is another critical metric. High stability reflects high availability, as well as minimal service disruptions and outages. Gauge your stability by monitoring your major incidents and problematic assets. If you find that your stability rate is low, the solve may be as simple as doing a review of your assets and software, along with curating self-help content with easy accessibility to minimize the influx of problematic tickets.  

 

• Software asset utilization rate is likely to be a metric your team will need to be monitoring. Your team is likely responsible for managing all aspects regarding software and corresponding licenses. The software asset utilization rate will tell you the percentage of those being used in the organization. Categorizing products and licenses appropriately and then analyzing this rate will allow you to cut unnecessary spending of your budget, impress higher management with your pulse on spend and also allow you to cut efforts on software that may not be necessary. 

 

• Cost per ticket is critical for help desk support operations. Getting a grasp on what your cost per ticket is will shine a light on how dire it is for you to truly get your ticket volume and efforts down. Also, this will be a metric that will really help you give a place to shine when reporting to higher management or executives when you have a great cost per ticket metric.  

 

How can I improve my IT ticketing system management with this help desk data?  

The most critical step to utilize this help desk data is to include a routine analysis and strategy check-ins. Your time is precious, however, this will be crucial and does not have to be as often as you may think.  

Set up a monthly meeting in place for starters. Use the space to review what’s happening with the appropriate stakeholders to make matters as efficient as they can be. Keep a keen eye on what the data is telling you and the opportunities presenting themselves. The solution to any negative trends may end up being as simple as providing a few more educational trainings for your team or delegating responsibilities appropriately.  

 

How can I start pulling the help desk data I need? 

If you don’t already, implement a data aggregation and visualization tool. You already have hundreds of tickets to go through – you shouldn’t manually dig through an enormous amount of data too. A proper data aggregation and visualization tool will connect with your databases to help organize, transform, and then output your data so it’s visualized in a manner where you can make sense of what is going on in a single view.  

Once you have that in place, you’ll be able to get a grasp on what areas need improvement and special attention.  

 

Your help desk data is there ready to tell you what needs your recognition and what needs to be done. Utilize this resource in order to improve your IT ticket system management and bring more success to your team.  

 

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Ready to make your data work for you? Try Aceyus’s VUE to aggregate, transform and visualize your data to see what needs to be done. Contact us today for a solutions consultation.  

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