Measuring response time correctly from the time of an incoming request email

[Guest Adrian Hodgson]

There is a fundamental flaw in the way response times are calculated at the moment for requests made by email. I would like to count the time from when the support request has been has been received by email, rather than from when it is logged by the analyst. I raised this initially when I was planning the migration from Support Works in March 2016.

I understand that part of the reason for this is that priorities are only set once a response has been logged. In theory when a support desk is very busy an incoming email might not be logged for several hours so the response time (as far as the customer is concerned is really slow)

Is there a way to have two response time fields  e.g. Response time 1 is time from the incoming request to the time it is logged - we would use this as our response time measure - because for simple requests quite often we log them and respond at the point we are logging them. Response time 2 would be the time from logging the request to the time that a first more detailed reply is sent by the analyst - this is what you are measuring at the moment for email requests( but your are missing the time taken to log the request in the first place). For self service requests where the user logs the request Response time 1 is zero

As you are working on SLA's at the moment with new functionality please advise how and when you plan to tackle this.

I have discussed this with Bob Dickenson earlier today and he agrees that there is good logic in my point and a flaw in the calculation that should be addressed.

Adrian

ORC International 

 

 

[James Ainsworth]

Hi Adrian,

We do have your original request from March in our backlog.  I agree that being able to use the time of the incoming email as part of the response time calculation would be beneficial to the SLM.  This change is not yet scheduled for development, however we will continue to review and I'll keep you posted on its progress.

Regards,

James

[Steve Giller]

In case it affects the priority of this as a development, we would also find this useful - we used this functionality in Supportworks and would certainly implement it in Service Manager were it made available.

[Martyn Houghton]

@James Ainsworth

We would also find it useful to be able to set (backdate) the date/time logged of a request to that of when it was received into the mailbox when using the 'Raise Request' option and when starting the 'Response Timer' node having the ability to configure this to use that as the start time for the response timer rather than the current date/time of when the node is called.

Cheers

Martyn

[James Ainsworth]

Thanks for the additional feedback. I will make sure that you are all added to the change.

James

[Guest gregmarcroftorc]

Hi @James Ainsworth,

I work on Adrian's team at ORC International and we were wondering if there was an update on this?

Thanks

Greg

ORC International

[James Ainsworth]

Hi @gregmarcroftorc

Thanks for your post.  This is still in our backlog and something that we will look at.  It is not on our current schedule but I will update this post once there is some progress.

Regards,

James