I like to write about tech support, because that’s what I do. Support can be demanding, but when you get down to it there are only so many things I can write. Having the required knowledge is a given — the real variables are often things like soft skills, time management, and understanding the business process of the people you’re there to help.
So let’s just say you’re doing all this, or making your best attempt. How can you tell if the service you provide is getting better? In other words, how can you determine if you’re doing a better job?
If you work in a place which already has some sort of corporate standard for this sort of thing (eg, Six Sigma, Baldridge, or what have you) then you can use whatever tools or metrics are the norm in your workplace. If you don’t have something like that in place, however, you’re going to have to do it yourself. Somehow, you’re going to have to find a way to measure.
Obviously, this is some work, and it’s work that you aren’t specifically being paid for. If knowing exactly how well you are doing doesn’t interest you, stop reading. If however, you’re interesting in measuring your effectiveness, here are some ideas.
- Figure out what you want to measure. In order to track any sort of change, whether improvement or otherwise, you need to have a metric.
Pick what you want to measure. If possible, pick a metric that will be meaningful to your supervisor — incoming calls, support tickets opened and closed, issues resolved, or projects completed are all possible options.
As an aside, make sure that whatever you’re choosing is actually measurable; “customer satisfaction” may be a little harder to gauge, although you could (and may want to consider) periodically distribute an anonymous survey to your users to get just that sort of feedback.
Whatever it is that you want to measure, define it, and move on. - Define exactly what it is you’ll be measuring. Let’s say it’s support calls. What is a “call”? Are you measuing emails and IMs as well? What are you going to track: just the number alone? How long the call goes? The length of time between when you receive the call and when it is resolved? How many calls are missed (might be harder to track, but could be a valuable metric if you can make this number go down)? All of the above?
How detailed you decide to get will depend on how enthusiastic you are about a project like this. If you plan to track yourself for a year and show the results to your manager at your next review, you might want to be quite detailed. If it is just for your own personal use, you might decide to just pick one area and focus on it for three months, and then focus on improving a different area. It’s up to you. - Determine how you’ll implement the measurement. If you can pull reports on your tickets or incoming calls, this might be very easy. On the other hand, if you don’t have these sort of tools available you might have to figure out a manual way to track it yourself — a notebook, a spreadsheet, anything that works for you. If you want to easily create graphs and such, a spreadsheet might be a good idea.
Again, you’ll need to choose your methodology based on what you want to do with these metrics, how much time you have to spend, and how important the details are to you. - Decide on a goal and a deadline. It’s good to have goals. Let’s say you’re measuring how long it takes from when an issue is reported until it is resolved. You’ll need to measure each problem, the time you received it, and the time it was resolved.
Before you can have a goal, you’ll need to know how you are doing right now. This means you might need to measure for a while just to see how you’re doing. Yes, the fact that you’ve started to measure may influence your response time — good, that’s what we want to improve anyways. Say you find out that it takes an average of 8 hours for an issue to be resolved; this may relfect a range of issues solved in 1 minute to those that take 2 days. Therefore, evaluate whether you can improve this. You might decide you’d like an average of 4 hours resolution time; or, if that seemed unreachable, 6.
Whatever your goal, pick one and give yourself a deadline; 1 month, 3 months, 6 months. Again, it may depend on the issue and how passionate you are about a personal improvement project. - Document and evaluate. If things are improving, try to figure out why. Is it just because you’re being a little more prompt & proactive? That’s fine; make a note of it. Could you have improved more? Why or why not?
If another process outside your control was a blockage or a bottleneck to your success, make a note of it. If you have good reasons and metrics, report it to your manager and see if it can be changed. Even if it can’t, you’re showing considerable initiative.
Whether this is for your own information, or whether you plan to show your results to your supervisor, hopefully said results will be meaningful and useful. If nothing else, you can know that you’ve improved a process or service, and you have the measurements to prove it. Even if it doesn’t impress your supervisor, try putting Improved Support Response Time by 30% on your resume and see how many more callbacks you get; that’s the sort of thing resume readers are desperately wanting to see.
Most, if not all, of the preceeding is simply common sense. However, measuring and evaluating our own performance is not something we often think to do automatically. At the very least, it’s something to think about; if you can’t measure it, how do you really know if you’re doing any better now than you were a year ago?
