Help Desk Incentive Program

[winniethepooh]

I am the manager of a 3 person proprietaty software helpdesk. I want to create an incentive program that rewards both group and individual accomplishments. I am looking for categories/targets to track. We are not a typical call center in that we do not track abandonment rate, talk time, wrap or idle time.

Thanks for your ideas.
Winnie

[Ginny Ellis]

To incentivize your agents, you must first establish key performance measures based on your business rules. Once your KPMs are established, you need to assign a monetary value or point structure to each component. Redemption of the incentive (dollars, days off, lunch, movie or theater tickets, gift certificate) should be rewarded on a monthly basis. Be sure to check with your controller to insure that the incentive dollar reward is properly reported as earnings. There could be a reporting stipulation for other types of incentive rewards - your controller should know. Hope this helps!! Retaining knowledgably agents is key for a successful support department.

[mdbabb]

Hi Winnie,

If I am understanding your post correctly, it sounds as though you would like to motivate your employees through recognition of the service provided to the calling customer rather than the normal call center stats.

You might want to consider tracking first call resolution (% of calls resolved without a ticket in the first contact) and mean time to repair and quality. (MTTTR is the average of closure for tickets.)

We currently track MTTR in order to determine performance metrics for trouble issues within our internal Helpdesk. It has been extremely benefical in trending movements of ticket resolution for both our call center and the IT departments.

Some organizations break down MTTR into different areas. Tracking MTTR by priority or root cause is a great example of this. I currently track the MTTR of all tickets generated by the call center by technology piece and disposition - useful numbers in the call center technology for justifing upgrades or juding vendor performance. (Our call center technology is maintained by an outside vendor, but our IT department is responsible for following up with that vendor until completion.)

From a Helpdesk standpoint, you could track MTTR by group as an incentive item. First call resolution could also be used as an individual incentive program.

Please email me at michelle.d.babb@kp.org if you would like more information on the MTTR piece. I'll be happy to go over in more detail what we are currently using.