What metrics are essential for production support, and how can they be used to improve performance?

Essential metrics for production support include system uptime, incident resolution time, and customer satisfaction. Tracking these metrics helps identify bottlenecks and recurring issues, enabling proactive problem-solving and system enhancements. Monitoring resource utilization and error rates can also pinpoint performance bottlenecks. By analyzing these metrics, support teams can streamline operations, optimize system performance, and enhance the overall user experience.

Metrics are key for support teams as you cannot improve, monitor, or resolve something if you are not measuring it first. Key performance indicators (KPIs) will vary across organizations and you need to do your due diligence to identify them. If you do not have KPIs yet, you need sit down with your stakeholders and make sure you list every single metric. Once you identify the metrics you need to plan what tools and resources you are going to spend to support them as they may not be configured in your systems.

Service level agreements (SLAs) serve as a way to standardize the amount of time and resources that should be spent for resolving an issue. These metrics are great to gather all required stakeholders at the same time, for example, when you have a P1 impacting major apps and systems the SLA decreases up to 4 hours and in order to meet the SLA all teams must work together to fix or mitigate the issue before the 4 hours. If for any reason the issue cannot be fixed right away but a mitigation can be done a Problem Record (PR) needs to be created to analyze further.

It is important to consider including customer feedback metrics, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Effort Score (CES), in order to gain valuable insights into user satisfaction and the ease of support interactions. By utilizing customer-centric metrics, production support can better align itself with user expectations, which leads to improved service quality and overall performance. This holistic approach ensures that support efforts are directly addressing user needs.

In my opinion, these are the most difficult metrics to evaluate the support team because there are so many factors that could impact the customer experience that will not allow the support team to address the issues accordingly. However, we cannot look to the other side when the customers are sharing their feedback and opinions on what, where and who can improve their customer service experience.

- Make sure that your Support team doesn't ask for a positive feedback, because that causes pressure on the customer. - Set a "chilling period" between feedback surveys to the same person. Just because someone opened 3 tickets this month, it doesn't mean they want to be bothered with a survey 3 times during the same month. - Set a policy regarding tickets that had several Support people writing comments in them. You may not want to send a survey in such a case, of have it as a survey that's not specific to a representative.

Monthly/Quarterly Deep dives into Major incidents and long running PROD issues. This exercise allows to objectively look at the reasons incidents happen or lingering prod issues remain. The production support team with Development team should objectively review all these and as a result prioritized list of items should flow into Stability Book Of Work (SBOW) and then that should be tracked to make sure issues get remediated and avoid more incidents.

Metrics that favor profitability over work\life balance. SLA's that chose quantity or quality. Using skeleton crews for tech support because it's possible doesn't make it okay.