Getting by with Technical Support Indicators

Access your KPIs online;
Measure your success;

Navigation: All Balanced Scorecard Articles > Customer Service and Call centers

To measure the performance of the technical support team, quantifiable measures have to be set up. These come in the form of technical support indicators or measures. Check additional information about Support Indicator.

Since the balanced scorecard and KPIs or key performance indicators have been introduced by their founders into the business world, the usage of these managerial tools has expanded extensively. In fact, during the recent years, these KPIs have indeed become quite the popular managerial strategy. Even the call center industry has joined the bandwagon, and this is especially true in the sense of technical support indicators as well.

Technical KPIs are extremely useful because these quantifiable measures give team managers and account managers a bird's eye view of what is currently happening on the floor. The typical call center would have hundreds - even thousands - of technical support agents. Yes, the floor would be teeming with agents, associates, and representatives, and it would be hard for a team manager - let alone an account manager - to monitor each and every agent and his or her performance day in and day out. This means that without these indicators, it would be extremely difficult for managers and supervisors to analyze and interpret insufficient information, to begin with, for them to come up with the right course of action to take. The bottom line here is then that for any call center to manage their assets well, there is then the need to use KPIs.

Let us take the typical scenario of a call center. You have to keep in mind that these KPIs should not be regarded as the be-all, end-all basis of the call center itself. Remember, as important as these KPIs are, these are merely managerial tools. Thus, the very first thing to do here is to formulate appropriate and realistic goals and objectives.

The call center's vision would understandably general in nature. It would then fall on the shoulders of the management to come up with objectives that are more specific in nature. After that, the management should then formulate KPIs that are relevant to the objectives and goals that have been set up.

One particularly common technical support KPI, for instance, is average handling time. Average handling time is actually the average period of time an agent makes use of to deal with a customer's inquiry. Now, a related objective here could be the improvement of agents' technical skill levels. For this particular objective, the KPIs that can be used would include average handling time, of course, training evaluation test scores, training hours per agent, and more.

As soon as the appropriate indicators are chosen, the next step would then be to keep track of the indicators themselves. This is precisely why you should use only the relevant ones, for keeping track of useless ones would just be a waste of time. Plus, there is the fact that you need to change your KPIs every once in a while, especially when it becomes noticeable that an existing KPI is no longer as effective as it should be. Such a KPI should be replaced right away, to ensure smooth flow of operations still.

With these tips in mind, you will surely be able to come up with a good set of technical support indicators for your organization to make use of.

If you are interested in Support Indicator, check this link to find out more about support metric. Also, you can check other articles in Customer Service and Call centers category.

Balanced Scorecard Toolkit includes step-by-step manuals, documents, presentations, check lists designed to help business professionals with successful development and implementation of Balanced Scorecard. Learn more about BSC Toolkit.