Standard Service Levels

We set up a standard service level for our software support team; all help calls were to be resolved within three days. It seemed to work as average times dropped dramatically. But, customers were still unhappy. It ended up that technicians were just closing the tickets after three days whether the problem was fixed or not. They’d open another ticket, or provide help off-the-record in order to meet the standard. We’d ignored the capacity of the system and set an arbitrary, unreachable target. The people did what they needed to do to survive in the impossible system we created. Now that we understand variation, failure demand, and system capacity, we’ve been able to to truly improve service, instead of just the numbers.