‘I’ll call you…later!’
‘I’ll call you tomorrow to let you know how we are getting on’.
It’s easily said to a customer reporting a problem, and if the number of Incidents that you staff are dealing with is small (and the environment no overly hectic) it’s not so difficult to do.
However… once the number of Incidents active for each member of the Service Desk/Helpdesk rises (say above 20), the likelihood of that callback being made starts to dip alarmingly. If Incidents are being re-assigned to specialist teams in the meantime, the likelihood drops to ‘not very likely at all’.
Let’s ask ourselves this: does it matter? After all, our Service Level Agreement (SLA) measures the timeliness of the initial response. However, that is just the initial response – what about Incidents that take longer to resolve? My experience is simple: regular communication with customers is vital, and too important to be left to chance.
I’ve posted before that good SLA metrics don’t necessarily mean happy customers, and I think this is another instance. For the most part customers remember if you’ve promised to give a callback and will look forward to the call. If it does not arrive, you’ve tarnished your Helpdesk/Service Desk’s reputation, with many customer’s drawing a conclusion that you’ve ‘forgotten’ about their Incident and are not working on it which is often not the case.
So, what do we do? This is an area where you have to rely on your ITSM tool to help you, and my next post will cover this for Serio users.
If you are a Service Delivery or Service Level Manager you should consider what statistics you have available for monitoring callback performance. If you have none, I would suggest this is something you need to address as a matter of urgency.
