Performance vs. Quality in a Help Desk Environment

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Since I’m moving on from my current job at Ann Taylor, I thought I would share an essay I wrote for them comparing performance and quality in a help desk environment. I didn’t have a lot of time to work on this when I wrote it so I was about 80% happy with how it came out. You’ll notice near the end, it’s not a tight as it should be. Maybe one day I’ll go back and finish it up the way I wanted but for now here.

Performance vs. Quality in a Help Desk Environment

The very word help in the phrase ‘help desk’ implies a demand for immediate attention. Given the emphasis on immediacy, you might expect that the better the help desk, the faster the response. Speed alone, however, is not enough for a first-rate help desk. The quality of the response counts, too. And it takes the right combination of people, training and technology to maximize the speed and quality of help desk response. Traditional help desks concentrate on performing two well circumscribed functions - handle high volume traffic and ensure “mission critical” performance. Most assessments seem to think these two qualities are linear to each other. For instance, when speed is emphasized, typically shortcuts are taken in the processes and communication that otherwise would have led to quality or lasting value to the customer. On the other hand, emphasizing quality could easily cause too much time on communication and processes that hinder reaching a timely resolution. At best, we can provide an equilibrium of the two.

Since performance is easily defined and measured, let’s look at quality. Quality is defined as the “value to some person”. What this means is the same answer does not satisfy the same people. A technician needs to be able to identify this problem on a daily basis and adjust. As I see it, to an extent, performance provides quality. When dealing with a client on the phone, we are not trained to take into account of the third party that is also involved, the customer. In the fast-paced 21st century of one-click online shopping and credit cards, customers expect more than to have to wait while a simple purchase at a retail store turns into a 5-10 minute affair. When a client calls the help desk, they expect me to have the answer to their problem so they can fix it and get the customer on there way. They do not want to know how the weather is in Connecticut nor do they care about the rash I have. They just want the customer to be taken care of in the quickest way possible. In this type of situation, performance equals quality. It is up to the technician to make the determination when this is appropriate and not. While in the previous situation performance provides quality, in others it does not.

Its been said that there is no good technicians and no bad technicians in our line of work. The reality of the situation is there are. What makes a technician “good” in comparison to “bad” is their ability to take accuracy and client satisfaction and apply it to speed and volume. The balance between performance and quality starts and ends with the technician. The technician needs to be success oriented to help take everything that is provided for him to do his job and use them to their benefit. This continual improvement is what takes his personal need to develop and turns him into a business oriented asset to the company. Most help desk’s first requirement is to hit high percentage targets then look at the first call resolution metrics. While numbers don’t lie, metrics can only show the performance side of a technician. There is no metric to show client satisfaction or just a simple desire to want to better one-self.

How do you promote a healthy balance between quality and speed? The biggest factor holding help desks back when trying to promote quality over performance is throughput. Performance must take a back seat when quality is given a priority. In the case of Ann Taylor’s help desk, the small size of the department will never fully allow quality to take priority over performance. Also in our environment, performance is penalized in the form of the faster you are, the more work you do. Our ACD is setup in such a way that whoever is ready will receive the next call in queue. So someone who is twice as fast as another will take twice as many phone calls, making twice as many tickets and fix twice as many issues. There is no incentive to finish up calls efficiently. Emphasis is taken off of performance when trying to provide quality service so there is no reason not to stay on the phone with a client for as long as it takes. While that would be ideal, in the case of a small help desk throughput drops which in turn cause longer hold times. The amount of time the client is on the phone, both in hold times and actually talk times, is in direct relation to the amount of quality they perceive. We are the gateway to any and all problems regardless of the severity of the issue. Taking a 6 minute phone call to answer a procedural question takes away from time that could be spent dealing with an actual problem of another client. There is no way of knowing when a call comes in or what it will entail. To provide a quality answer that the client is going to get off the phone satisfied, there is no set time limit.

In conclusion, performance and quality are not mutually exclusive. There is no fundamental reason why a technician cannot provide a quality answer in a timely manner. Unfortunately these skills are more learned than taught. Following the points I have made here, it seems the key to a first-rate help desk is neither performance nor quality but a technician that can understand the urgency of both. Adversely, the heart of most help desks seems to be metrics, and while this is understandable, it should not be, by any means, a measure of value. In an example of metrics being flawed, a technician who receives calls and answers them at a high volume rate will leave the client feeling rushed and confused. The technician gets off the call in a timely matter but the client has not been taken care of. First call resolution is based on what the technician feels is resolved and not the client. In another example, a technician could take his time with the client making sure everything is resolved and that there is no further issues to deal with. When checking against the metric, they will show this person as being a poor performer. While numbers don’t lie, they also do not show the human aspect of a call. In those two examples, I have shown how metrics can be misleading, but the real point is that they are both missing key qualities. A technician should have a complete understanding of the issue, the state the client is in and the resolution path that must be taken for each individual call. With this knowledge in hand, accuracy and speed can come together leaving the client pleased with the experience.