By Duncan Troup on Friday, January 15th, 2016 in Service Performance.

I’ve been working in service delivery for a long time now and its recently started to trouble me that traditional service management thinking pursues fix on first contact so hard. To be clear, i am not saying that this isn’t an important aspect of interrogating service performance – it’s just that, if unchecked, it can drive the wrong behaviour.

For example, a client i worked with removed about 5,000 calls to the service desk for password resets through self-service – big tick in the box. However, the maths of their FFC stats meant that their performance dropped. Why? Because they were rewarded for doing lots of menial tasks quickly, rather than fixing material issues.

For example, if have 20,000 calls a year and fix 95% on first contact. That’s 19,000 calls. If i remove 5,000 calls that were previously FFC then that’s now 14,000 call meeting FFC SLAs out of 15,000 in total. I have now dropped below 95% (93% to be exact).

So really all i am saying is that as an experience IT exec in operations, i would rather have a lower FFC rate, lower volume of calls and when called to be adding REAL value to my customers. The alternative being vanity stats that actually promote my creation of more and more meaningless interactions.

Just some food for thought.