Improved Request KPIs for ESPs

Thanks to a recent improvement in the Analytics console, external service providers (ESPs) get a lot more value out of their request and incident management KPIs.

This is best explained with an example. Let’s say that yesterday an end user submitted a request. This request was initially assigned to a support team within the IT department of the end user’s organizations. Today, this support team passed the request on to the ESP.

In this example, the request will show up in the “New Requests” KPI graph of the end user’s IT department on yesterday’s date. When the ESP looks at the “New Requests” KPI graph, however, they will find that same request when they click on today’s date. So, even though the request was registered yesterday, it was not considered ‘new’ for the ESP until the external customer assigned it to them.

The same logic now gets applied to determine the number of completed and reopened requests for the ESP. So when the ESP sets the status of our example request to “Completed”, the request will appear in the ESP’s “Completed Requests” KPI graph. But when the ESP’s customer looks at that same graph, the request will not yet be there. That’s because the request was returned to the support team of the customer so that its solution can be verified.

If this support team determines that the solution does not work, they can pass the request back to the ESP. That would cause the request to show up as ‘reopened’ in the ESP’s “Request Backlog Growth” KPI graph.

This gives ESPs the means to track their KPIs when they work together with customers that have their own 4me account. This is also valuable for the regional data centers and shared services organizations of large enterprises. These organizations typically have their own 4me account that is linked to the 4me account of each IT departments that they support.