We touched on this subject when looking at a few of the incident handling metrics, however, to get a good picture of how support engineers are performing we need a lot more information. A couple of metrics that can be used are: number of issues (not just incidents, but all types) solved, average time needed for each solution, customer satisfaction level, SLA performance report, and number of complaints. (See the other sections in this chapter for more information about these metrics.)

How easy it is to get these metrics depends on the helpdesk tool in place. Some tools offer detailed level custom reporting to get this information quickly with nice charts for progress and so on. Sometimes you can only get this information out of a system using a database export or similar. If the tool in use does not offer support for these sorts of reports, I recommend spending the time to get the information out of the system and generate reports on individual performance on a regular basis.

Whenever these reports are generated and evaluated, there should be a one-to-one conversation between the support manager and the support engineer. This is needed because the results of these metrics are meaningless until they are discussed for proper interpretation. In these conversations you have a chance to explain the results to your manager. Perhaps you have been spending time and effort on learning about a new product. Or perhaps you have focused on cleaning up older issues and have, therefore, scored low on the SLA performance, but high on the number of issues you closed. Metrics are important for measuring performance, but need interpretation to be useful when evaluating individual employees. If the metrics have been gathered over a very long period of time they may be more objective and less influenced by short term focus shifts. Thus, these metrics can be used to influence yearly performance evaluations.