Of late, IT Service Management (ITSM) has become increasingly important to a company’s IT strategies. They are seeking new ways to improve IT service delivery and efficiency through better ITSM processes. ITSM’s processes and functions demand the use of a range of ITSM tools. ITSM Software manages the workflow of service delivery and enables communication between customers and providers. This increases the importance of measuring and tracking critical KPIs.
Overwhelmingly large amounts of data make it difficult for the users to manually access, track, and analyze critical help desk information quickly. Advanced IT analytics can help managers identify hidden gaps and blind spots in their ITSM process and make accurate decisions by monitoring key metrics.
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Keeping all these factors in mind, let us now understand how advanced IT analytics can help you get the most out of your IT service desk.
- Resource Management Optimization: Real-time dashboards allows you to monitor periods of peak business activity. It also helps you manage technician workload by measuring critical metrics like number of incoming requests, ticket turnaround time and technician performance. You can improve your service desk efficiency by developing an optimal staffing model to suit the increasing volume of customer demands.
- Minimization of Business Downtime impacts: You can anticipate service outages by monitoring metrics like frequency of downtime and mean time to repair (MTTR). These metrics will help you build intuitive reports to identify crucial failure points and to understand the impact of an infrastructure change (software upgrade or server migration). You can share these reports with your team and communicate effectively. Formulate an action plan and share it with your team to help them handle such emergency situations.
- Maximize ROI on Software purchases: Prevent unnecessary expenses on software using a software asset management report. It helps you track licenses (identifies under-licensed and over-licensed software), predicts service request trends, and measure software utilization rates. Your teams can plan ahead for future license purchases, maintain compliance rates through internal assessments, and purchase software that adds value to the organization. This avoids compliance risks and high costs.
- Enhance Service Quality: Judging the overall performance of your service desk based on ticket resolution and closure rate by the performance of a technician are not enough. Sometimes, there are chances that technicians tend to close tickets without properly resolving the issues, just to show high closure rates and prove their capabilities. In order to combat this, managers can use analytical tools to derive a correlation between ticket resolution and re-opening rates to accurately determine the work efficiency of the technicians. This, in turn, enhances the service quality of your company.
- High-level customer satisfaction: One of the most daunting tasks for service desks teams is maintaining Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Any breach in the SLAs will make the customers angry and frustrated. This causes loss of credibility and revenue for the organization. A real-time SLA dashboard detects ticket priority and assignment. It can measure service desk performance accordingly, against end-user service levels. Teams can utilize this information to set realistic SLA goals, automate and route ticket assignments. They can even communicate the risks of SLA breach and proactively set up escalations. The importance of analytics plays a major role in enhancing IT service delivery. The first step towards achieving any form of process efficiency is through empowering the users. –
According to a survey conducted by ManageEngine, the real-time IT management company, 85% of users believe that ITSM analytics would enhance IT service delivery. It includes 36% who opine that analytics would improve service desk efficiency, while 30% opined that it would identify gaps in the ITSM process. Considering the critical reporting area, 43% users preferred to generate reports on their own, while 21% of users depended on third-party software or other teams.
Analytics Of This Survey
This survey identified some common challenges faced in data analytics and preferences that service desk users share.
- Report Creation takes a long time. 48% of users opined that it took more than 30 minutes to create a service desk report. On-demand reporting is also dominant, according to the results.
- Increased dependency on other sources to create reports, including query reports, visualization tools, and third-party reporting software or support teams. Report customization is critical as well, where 43% of users preferred custom reports over standard ones.
- Incident management modules require more attention. Almost 22% (one quarter) of respondents opined that incident management was the module that requires more reports. It was followed by asset management (17%), and greater customization for change management (13%).
- Deep analysis help reveal hidden gaps in the ITSM process. Repetitive issues can be detected early by proactive incident reporting, while unprepared issues and situations can be assessed with the help of analytical tools. This helps in increasing the overall efficiency.
This survey highlights the importance of analytics in enhancing IT service delivery. It also sheds light on what users expect from analytical tools. There are many analytical tools in the market, but most of them are too complicated, require expert assistance, or expensive and consumes too much time. According to the survey, users prefer a self-service analytics tool, that allows them to quickly build and personalize reports.
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