For modern businesses, having quality IT support and infrastructure is crucial for operations and growth.
However, evaluating the effectiveness of your current IT support can be difficult without clear metrics.
In this guide, we will share some guidance on assessing the success of your business’s IT support and identifying areas for improvement.
Defining Goals And Objectives
The first step in evaluating IT support is to define the specific goals and objectives it should achieve for your business.
Some key examples include:
Maximising system uptime and reliability – Target 99.9% or greater monthly uptime.
Providing quick and knowledgeable troubleshooting and issue resolution – Strive for 24 hr max response time on support requests.
Proactively identifying and addressing potential problems before they cause disruptions – Track numbers of threats mitigated.
Keeping infrastructure and software up-to-date, secure, and compliant with regulations – Maintain optimal patch and upgrade schedules.
Scaling capabilities as your business grows and changes – Monitor usage growth against support capacity.
Offering training and guidance on technologies to users – Survey user confidence levels with systems.
With clear goals established, you have criteria to measure support performance against.
Assessing Overall Performance
When examining overall IT support performance, two key performance indicators (KPIs) to consider are:
System Uptime
Your support should aim for the highest possible percentage of total uptime. Track outages or periods of degraded performance and their causes.
Benchmark against industry standards for your business type and size. SaaS services often aim for 99.95% uptime monthly while on-premises systems may target 99.5% or higher.
Help Ticket Resolution Time
Measure the average time it takes for support staff to resolve issues from initial help ticket creation to completion. Faster resolution indicates better performance.
Target 24-48 hours for moderate issues and under 4 hours for critical incidents depending on your operations.
Also track metrics like customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), average hold times, abandon rates for calls/chats, and first contact resolution percentage.
Long-term trend analysis of these KPIs will determine if support quality is improving and goals are being met.
Evaluating Responsiveness
Your support team’s responsiveness when issues arise is also important to assess. Consider factors like:
Average speed of initial response to support requests – Benchmark against internal SLAs or industry standards.
Live chat, phone, or other channels available for urgent issues – Offer multiple assisted contact options.
Self-service FAQs and knowledge bases to empower users – Expand available self-help resources.
After-hours or emergency support options – Provide 24/7 mission-critical service if needed.
Flexibility to provide greater resources during critical incidents – Scale-up assistance for major outages.
Faster, continuous access to support staff reflects better service. Conduct periodic tests, such as creating help tickets at different times and days, to evaluate real-world responsiveness.
Measuring User Satisfaction
Your own internal users are customers of your IT support function. Their feedback provides insight into how support meets real needs.
Consider surveying users periodically with questions like:
How satisfied are you with the support team’s skills and knowledge?
How would you rate their speed to resolve most issues?
How well does support communicate status and fixes?
Has the team improved systems and processes for users?
Do they effectively assist with training and guidance?
Overall, how would you rate your experience with IT support?
Distribute via email, internal messaging, or quick in-person interviews. Offer incentives for participation. High user satisfaction signals your support achieves business objectives. Low satisfaction reveals areas needing improvement.
Benchmarking Against Alternatives
See how your current IT support measures up against other options by benchmarking with:
Industry averages – Research typical support KPIs for your business size and vertical. Compare to your stats.
Competitors – If possible, learn how competitors’ support functions perform on uptime and responsiveness.
Potential alternatives – Reach out to prospective support firms and compare offerings, pricing, and reviews
If your current support falls short of viable alternatives, a switch may be warranted. You can also use competitors as goals to aim above.
Assessing Value And ROI
Consider your support function’s overall value by weighing performance against costs.
Factor in:
Direct contract and labour costs for support personnel
Productivity improvements and cost savings from support efforts
Revenue loss estimates from system outages
IT staff costs, office space, and other overhead
Benefits like increased employee satisfaction and retention
Support that maximises ROI delivers the right balance of service quality and budget efficiency.
Auditing Processes And Documentation
Examine how well your support function adheres to ITIL guidelines, documents solutions in knowledge bases, and leverages automation playbooks.
Superior codification means problems are solved faster with less reliance on specific staff.
Review:
Incident response process documentation
FAQ and troubleshooting resources
Training content for new hires
Strong documentation ensures continuity of operations even with personnel changes.
