In the first of a series of Gauge Review blog posts I want to introduce and review one of our newest Gauges, Service Backlog (credited to Advisory Council member, Rick Phipps from Intrust Group).
The simple formula for this Gauge is “Opened Tickets minus Closed Tickets” over a one month period and showing the previous 6 or 12 months in the actual chart. For example, if a customer opened 10 tickets last month and you closed 12 tickets that same month for the customer than the chart will register -2 for the month. Very straightforward math. Rick has been manually sending this type of data for years as a way to show his customers how Intrust is handling the volume of tickets coming in from that customer. Let’s take a look at a few examples below to see how this Gauge tells a story for your customer.
In this first screenshot I’m showing Service Backlog for one of Compuquip’s “normal” customers. As you can quickly see its pretty even throughout the past 12 months and tells the story that Compuquip is pretty much taking care of support requests quickly. Something happened in December potentially but Compuquip quickly recovered and caught up in January. Informative, simple and shows that Compuquip services are working!
Now take a look at this next customer. Right away you can see something is wrong because there have been way more tickets opened than being closed over the past 12 months. Its gotten better but Compuquip hasn’t caught up 100%. Having the benefit of knowing this customer I can tell you that the customer is over utilizing the service desk and field support team and tickets are dragging, not good for the level of service required. For this particular customer the original structure for support is not sufficient for the amount of support requests being generated. Compuquip is addressing this problem with them in the next quarterly business review. This gauge is a helpful tool in visualizing the support problem for this customer.
This last screenshot is also interesting because this is a brand new customer for Compuquip. Though its only a few tickets accumulating over the past few months the trend did not start out great but not, again, Compuquip is catching up. And mostly thanks to this visualization that went out to this customer recently.
Adding Service Backlog to your reports will help paint a better picture of the response time and level of service you are providing a customer. It’s one more step forward in providing MEANINGFUL information to your customer. Thanks Rick for the suggestion!
