Transition to a competitive environment
The motivation is one of the great challenges of managing helpdesk. Keeping morale among support staff and encourage them to strive for continuous improvement is difficult in a line of work where there are so many requests from customers. Even more, most of them come from frustrated customers who already have everything tried to solve their problem.
A great facilitator of positive motivation in this environment is to set individual targets for support staff and create a competitive environment. By observing each other settings, each agent will support objective measurements that compare to their peers. For most, this is enough motivation to strive for continuous improvement. For those who are not driven by these types of goals, you as a manager will always be able to see where they stand relative to their peers.
There are several ways to make a transition to a competitive metrics. One approach is to create a comparative report, but to replace all the names of your support staff with a label, such as Agent A, Agent B, etc. Everyone knows what their labels are, and can see how they stand in the classification.
Another approach has been used successfully is to generate two individual measures and measures of an average team. Using this approach each agent sees only his or her individual scores and metric, against the team average. Each agent can see whether they are above or below average. As everyone tries to be above average, average go up higher, encouraging greater competition and continuous improvement.
After you complete the second approach, you can also set up a third competitive initiative – Employee/Agent of the month. By making a big deal about your top employee and sharing parameters of this person, you’ll make a next step to a competitive environment. Using this method, the upper set of the competition will be people with great drive and initiative to the next level. Performers who are below average can not even consider that level, but they will always have the goal through the middle of the team to move the average. The usual motivation is also to promote themselves within a company, and to gain a higher help desk role and responsibility.
The typical measures that should be included in the competitive metrics are:
- The average speed of resolution
- Percent of schedule / availability
- Case overdue count with effective monitoring, and
- Customer satisfaction rate.
These and others parameters available under the help desk reporting section from SympoQ allows you to stay focused on only the most important parameters, so your support staff can keep a focus. The summary metrics contain reports by support queues, support agents, customers’ groups, and individual end users.