In today’s business world where data is stored in many places and different applications are utilized to perform jobs, defining metrics that are important and relevant to inform performance, resource allocation, and operational changes is both crucial and challenging.
Community IT’s leadership team established a set of team and company Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) a few years ago. Pulling the data was tedious and time consuming. Managers had to run canned reports from our PSA (Professional Services Automation) system, or create complicated pivot tables from CSV exports or direct SQL connections. In addition to being time consuming, the end results were inaccurate and inconsistent.
Community IT started looking at other reporting tools that integrated with our PSA system, and tested two of them. BrightGauge had matured its services at that time, added a dashboard, and different gauges that in July of last year we decided to pilot BrightGauge and ultimately partner with them as our reporting system.
BrightGauge has simplified our job in many ways, to mention a few:
Inform performance in our help desk team
Live information about help desk performance is critical to delivering quality service to our clients. Basic indicators such as response and resolution time by team and technician, identifying aging tickets, and easily discovering the number of tickets submitted after hours were all tasks that required our manager to do a lot of manual work.
Hardware Inventory
This was another task that required manual intervention and, in many occasions, a site visit. BrightGauge along with our monitoring system has allowed us to not only automate the developing of the report itself but also saves us from having to make costly and time-consuming on-site visits.
Proactive Service
One of the things we were able to create with BrightGauge is a warranty report that allow us to proactively notify our clients of machines with warranties that are about to expire.
Client Services
As part of our Managed Service offering, we meet with most of our clients on a regular basis. Preparing for these meetings required us to run different reports around tickets, system alerts, and budgeting information. Preparing for these meetings used to take 2-3 hours of manual report generation. Now with BrightGauge, these reports are pre-set and automatically delivered. Both client and Network Manager can now spend time focusing on the results, rather than the creation of the report itself.
Developing the right set of KPIs is important, but having a tool that ensures accuracy and consistency is even more important. BrightGauge has not only allowed us to continue monitoring our current KPIs but also to develop additional metrics for teams and individuals. This implementation has allowed us to allocate and utilize our resources better. Ultimately, this has lead to improved service and reduced costs for our clients, allowing us to offer better service through gauges.
A related version of this post appeared on the BrightGauge blog recently.
