Analyst Performance Templates: How to Make Them Actionable

Service desk analysts are like the unsung heroes of information technology. You never hear what a great job they are doing on a day-to-day basis until they make a mistake. Granted, they are not perfect and mistakes are made. Some are obvious, but most of the time the perception of the customer can be misleading. With tools such as call recording, you can drill down to individual calls and determine where improvements could be made and when, which is most of the time, your Analysts perform their jobs well. Many times, these analysts are perceived as individuals who are not performing according to management and/or customers’ expectations. In my experience, these perceptions lack the objectivity required to truly understand how an analyst is performing their role within the organization.

The definition of actionable is To be able to use or put into action, ready for use. Those are my expectations when I read an article, listen to a webinar, or attend a presentation that discusses templates. The purpose of actionable templates is to change a few names, enter a few numbers, and be off and running. Is that expecting too much?

As a service management professional who has managed several service desks, I attempt to provide expectations to my team and ensure I find the correct approach to measure their performance. Metrics put vague concepts into reality, and this is where I feel actionable templates do exist. The templates I’m sharing were created with feedback from peers, team members, and direct reports, allowing me to remove subjectivity and communicate requirements to my team members to help them successfully perform their job functions.

Let me share the magic pill for scoring your analysts' phone calls. Many times we want to feed scripts to our agents and turn them into robots, thus removing their personalities. "Checklist" is a better word for the Call Monitoring Template I’m sharing. They are applicable for inexperienced analysts or for veteran employees. Checklists enable you to build a roadmap for your team members and steer them towards successful customer interactions. It allows your analysts to increase performance and allows you to measure them objectively.

Another measurement tool I use in evaluating individual performance is monitoring tickets. When monitoring tickets, I ensure customer service objectives I designed are met and documented. These customer service objectives include many objective type questions used to create an Incident Evaluation Template. 

One last actionable template I would like to share combines a few metrics in a Personal Metric Template that aligns core competencies with performance evaluations. This template allows you to enter several metrics and use it during your annual performance review with your analysts so they can understand and improve their performance and the customer experience on an ongoing basis.

Eddie Vidal (@eddievidal) is an IT service management professional with more 25 years of experience in healthcare, transportation, hospitality and higher education. Currently Eddie is an independent consultant for EJV Corp, consulting for Memorial Healthcare System in South Florida. Eddie is an international keynote speaker, founder and president emeritus of the South Florida HDI Chapter, current member of the HDI Strategic Advisory Board, 11-time Fusion and HDI Conference track chair and speaker, and published author for HDI’s SupportWorld. He is the itSMF USA podcast producer and jockey, 2014 itSMF USA President’s Award Winner, and 2016 HDI Hall of Fame inaugural class inductee. He is certified in ITIL v3, OSA, and HDI Support Center Manager.