When an employee's computer fails or a system slows down, two questions arise: how long until someone responds, and how long until the problem is resolved. The Service Desk and the Service Level Agreement (SLA) exist to answer these two questions clearly.
What Is a Service Desk?
The service desk is the single point of contact between users and the IT team. All requests, whether by phone, email, or the ticketing system, are logged, and each one has a number, a priority, and an owner. No request gets lost among messages and calls.
Priority Levels
Not all issues are equally urgent. A complete outage of a critical system that has halted the whole organization is not the same as one person's slow computer. Typically three or four priority levels are defined, each with its own response time and resolution time.
Metrics to Track
- First response time: From ticket submission to the expert's first response.
- Resolution time: From logging to full resolution of the issue.
- First-contact resolution rate: What percentage of issues are resolved without escalation.
- SLA compliance rate: What percentage of requests were closed within the agreed time.
- User satisfaction: A short survey after each request is closed.
- Recurring issues: Which errors recur repeatedly, and what their root causes are.
From Reactive to Proactive
Service desk data shows where the team's time is spent. If a large share of requests relates to an old printer or a particular application, fixing that problem at its root is more cost-effective than handling it repeatedly.
SLA in the support contract
If you outsource support, response times, resolution times, coverage hours, the request submission process and monthly KPI reporting must be written into the contract. A contract without these leaves no yardstick for measuring service quality.
Modern Shabakeh Partak support is delivered based on ticketing, priority levels and periodic reporting, so that service quality is measurable for your organization.
