Question

We've been using FogBugz 5.0 for a few years, and it's great. We would like to add some simple quality metrics to support cases as they are closed by our tier 1 support staff. We're thinking about things like Speed (was the case closed quickly), Escalation (did the tier 1 support person need any help in closing the case) and Accurate (was the response correct).

We're thinking about adding special codes to another field like Version (which we don't use for these types of cases at the moment), but I'm wondering what other people do? How do you measure, report and improve support performance metrics?

Thanks, Armen

Answer 1

Sorry, I feel compelled to chime in here with my crusty old support veteran point of view: Measuring support when you're not huge is a premature optimization. It's similar to worrying about scaling your web app when you have 100 users.

I've been in software support for seven years, five at Google, two of which were spent trying to extract meaningful data from a pretty good ticketing system about the operation of a 30-person, globally distributed support team. I left there to come here and I've got two years running Fog Creek's support function.

As to trying to help the support managers at Google by getting them data, I can only say that the effort at tracking support performance was a total failure. Extracting the data was not all that hard. Extracting actionable, non-gameable metrics was near impossible.

If you're not operating at scale (read: over a hundred support reps, thousands of tickets a day), your time is much better spent advocating for fixes that will reduce support traffic than it is figuring out how good/bad a job you're doing with the actual support. Reducing load is a virtuous cycle that leads to more productivity. Measuring your performance is a distraction.

Answer 2

If the Version field (or Computer field, for that matter) is already being used for other types of cases, it might be worth using a new custom field for this to keep the support performance metrics separate.

Answer 3

The new plugin architecture of FogBugz 7.0 (you are a couple of versions behind) makes this really simple. You can add your own custom fields.