Help Desk Best Practices

Help desk best practices is an official set of standards used to provide a superior help desk to customers. These help desk standards help companies know what is acceptable in providing a good help desk. These best practices also give companies a standard help desk improvement and performance goal.

Here are the Best Practice Goals for Help Desks:

• Average First Call Resolution rate: 65%
• Average Length of first level support calls: 5min. 12 sec
• Average length of first level support call prior to escalation to second level: 8.6 mins.
• Average abandon call rate: 5.58%
• Stated abandon call rate target 4%
• Average of Helpdesk problems resolved by phone: 69%
• Percentage of help desk industry promoting Self Help technologies: 30%
• Average cost of support per incident: $25.00
• Password resets and printer problems combine to make up 20% of all service requests

(source: www.hdaa.com.au)

To reach these helpdesk best practices goals, the whole company must work together on the help desk solution. Help desk reports must be run daily, as well as call monitoring. Help desk employees must be informed of the help desk best practice goals, so they can do their part for the help desk. Reaching the help desk practice goals means a company is providing superior customer service to all those who come in contact with the help desk.

Sometimes, to study what best practices are, we must look at worst practices. These are the practices which a help desk does not want to repeat, like hold times averaging over 2 minutes or slow turnaround rates on help desk tickets. The goal of a help desk is to provide the customer with better customer service, but if the help desk is not working towards the best practices standard then help desk satisfaction will very possibly be low.

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