How do you measure your own performance, and do we see it?

A provider that cannot tell you how it is performing is asking you to take it on faith, and faith is hard to audit. These are the numbers we hold ourselves to and show you.

• First contact within 15 minutes, for clients on a managed agreement. How quickly a person makes contact after something is reported. This is the one clients feel most, because the gap between reporting a problem and hearing from a human is where frustration actually lives, more than in the time to fix. Break-fix work is best effort and we do not publish a number we would be guessing at.
• Response against the published tiers. One hour for business down, four business hours for standard, next business day for low priority. Measured as attainment rather than as an average, because an average hides the one that took three days.
• How often tickets hit the two touch escalation. Our tier one and tier two technicians escalate automatically after two touches. The rate at which that fires tells us whether our first line is properly equipped or whether something is being escalated that should not need to be. It is as much a measure of us as of any individual.
• Satisfaction on closed tickets. Every closed ticket asks, and the owner reads the answers rather than a summary of them.
• Ticket volume over time, per client. This is the one that matters most in the long run, and the direction is the point. A well run environment should generate fewer tickets in year two than in year one. If yours is going the other way, something is wrong and the number says so before anyone feels like complaining.

You see this in your review, not on request. It arrives whether the numbers are good or not, which is the part that makes it worth anything.

What we would rather you watch, honestly. Response metrics are easy to publish and easy to look good on. The work that actually protects you is the part you cannot see: patch compliance, whether restores have been tested, whether access reviews happened, whether anybody raised something you did not ask about. There is an article in this topic on exactly that, because those are the numbers that go quietly wrong first when a provider starts coasting, and ticket response times are the last thing to slip.

And when we miss. You get told rather than apologized to after the fact, and a pattern of misses is a credit conversation rather than a scheduling excuse. That is covered in its own article in the Support and response times topic.