CA Service Management

My activity has established a report, using our SDM ticket data, which show the ratio of the number of tickets that are open vs. the tickets that have been closed, month over month.  We are interested in knowing if there are any typical targets or best practices that have been identified for open to closed ticket rations?

Hi George,

Thats a great stat to know for sure!  As for your question, there really is no direct answer as to what the typical targets are that you should look to achieve.  Every customer is different, and every organization is different.  It really depends on the types of tickets that are the norm for your organization and how complex those are.  Of course when looking at the trend of that ratio, the lower it is, the better - meaning if you have 10 open and 9 closed, thats better than having 20 open and 2 closed.  SO the closer the numbers are to one another, the better your analysts are doing.  But the goal depends on where you are now vs. where you want to be, and what factors which you have control over that you can work on with the team to get the ratio to improve.  Identifying those factors and making them visible is what takes a lot of time to do.  For your use case, open vs. closed, you have to look at the factors that contribute to the incoming volume of tickets - for example, was a new application rolled out which is causing an influx of tickets?  Is it a holiday time in which volume of tickets coming in typically drops?  - and factor those things in.  So really you first have to define your end goals, and then look at where you are for each of those goals.  Then you can look at what needs improvement, and look to work on those areas.

Hope this helps a bit,

Jon I.

I totally agree with Jon.  Using stats and careful analysis to inform continuous improvement is a great practice.  Using stats as targets for analysts, on the other hand, tends to motivate an analyst to focus first on meeting their target and last on helping their caller. At a site where the indicator '% of tickets Fixed On First Call' (FOFC) was used as a KPI, I saw a Level 1 analyst keep a caller on the line for 40 minutes while ringing around Level 2 resources for a resolution, so that the ticket didn't get transferred away from Level 1 and blow the team's FOFC target.  Another site had a KPI on resolution within a priority-based SLA - and concidentally 99% of their tickets were assessed as Low Priority and marked 'on hold awaiting vendor' within seconds of being raised.  As the ancients say, 'be careful what you wish for'.

Cheers,

James

James you are very right!!!  The idea is that the behaviors should drive the metrics, the metrics should not drive the behaviors.  When that happens, employee engagement, morale go down, leading to a decrease in the quality of the overall customer experience