Glossary of Measurements
Average work time to resolve – number of minutes consumed per incident in developing an answer, fix, bypass or workaround. Determined by dividing the total minutes worked by the number of incidents resolved
Cost avoidance— the number of customer issues solved through self-service that would have become incidents (this is a subset of self-service customer success)
Competency profile—percentage of knowledge workers at each level of the KCS license model
Cost per incident— total support costs divided by the number of incidents closed
Cross-functional measures--measures to which multiple functions within the organization contribute. For example, product improvements require support to capture the interactions and recognize trends to give development credible input on high leverage opportunities for product improvement. Development must execute on these opportunities. The measure is shared by support and development. (See Transforming Performance Measurement by Spitzer)
Cultural health—knowledge workers’ attitude with respect to trust, commitment, conflict resolution, accountability, and focus on results. See Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Customer loyalty— the level of emotional connection a customer feels towards the company, a longer-term measure of overall relationship. Indicators include renewal rate, new product/upgrade adoption rate, and referenceability
Customer satisfaction—transaction-based measure of the degree to which we have met the customer expectations. This is a short-term measure of the customer experience with support. Indicators are speed or average work time to resolve, “percentage first contact resolution”, technical knowledge, and politeness of the knowledge worker
Employee loyalty— the level of emotional connection employees feel towards the company, gauged through surveys or in the cultural baseline
Employee turnover rate—internal and external attrition, the rate at which knowledge workers are leaving the support organization
Executive sponsor buy-in—the executive champion for the KCS program understands KCS and is vocally committed. This is a qualitative measurement, but may be judged by the willingness of the champion to present the plan for the project to executive management, to host a kickoff with the project team, and to support communication efforts with email and other outreach.
Incident volume—number of incidents, cases, or tickets opened
Link rate (or linking rate)—the number of incidents closed with an article linked or cited; includes both creation and reuse of articles
Percentage first contact resolution—percentage of incidents resolved the support center on the first interaction. Used as a customer satisfaction indicator as well as an employee proficiency or process goal
Product improvements (Number of RFEs accepted by product development)—the rate at which suggestions for product, documentation or service offering improvements are implemented by development, an indicator of influence
Ratio of known to new—new articles created in the knowledge base vs. reuse of existing articles
RFE—Request for product enhancement
Resolution capacity— how many incidents can the support organization handle in a period of time; indicators are incidents/month/person or average work time to resolve (work minutes, not elapsed time)
Self-service success--the percentage of time customers find what they need by using self-service (most often but not always use of the web)
Self-service use— the percentage of time customers use self-service before they open an incident
Content Standard Checklist—based on adherence to criteria defined in the KCS content standard (formerly Article Quality Index or AQI: see the KCS v6 Practices Guide)
Support cost as a percentage of total revenue—the ratio of support costs to total company revenue; used to normalize the cost of support in a dynamic environment. Other possible ways to normalize the support costs include against products shipped, licenses sold, customers subscribed (cross functional measure)
Time to adopt new/upgraded products—rate at which customers adopt new releases or products
Time to close – the elapsed time from incident open to incident closed
Time to proficiency for new employees and new technologies—the number of weeks or months required for an knowledge worker to work with a high degree of independence; the learning curve
Time to publish—time from initial issue discovery to the time information is available to customer
Time to resolution—See “average work time to resolve.” Elapsed time from opening of an incident to offering an answer, fix, bypass or workaround