FTF is so last year

“FTF is so last year” - that’s quite the statement for die hard First Time Fix fans (like us).

Coupled with Speed to Answer (Chats/Calls/Email response) and of course good old Customer Satisfaction, the First Time Fix (or ‘FTF’) Service Level has always been one of the most important measures for the Service Desk.

For the purposes of this article, a First Time Fix is whereby a user contacts the Service Desk, their Incident or Request is resolved / fulfilled there and then, and they go and get on with their day (hopefully thinking how brilliant the Service Desk are!).

High FTF achievement has always not only been perceived as good for the end user experience, but a high FTF target also helps drive the all-important initiative of ‘Shift Left'. Although Shift-Left itself just doesn’t get enough air time and in our experience, there’s never enough activity around it as everyone is 'too busy with Incidents and other stuff'.

If you haven’t heard of Shift-Left, it’s the concept of moving resolution activities from the ‘right’ (2nd / 3rd / 4th Line) to the ‘left’, i.e. 1st Line (Service Desk).

This is extremely powerful on so many levels;

1. Incidents / Requests are resolved faster due to reduced triage delays, meaning less user downtime

2. It creates a more positive perception of the Service Desk and therefore increases satisfaction scores

3. It creates more opportunity for 1st line and helps with staff retention

4. It reduces the costs of resolution, as 1st line staff typically cost a lot less than 2nd, 2nd line costs less than 3rd line and so on

5. It reduces all the admin and further delays associated with email ping pong back and forth trying to pin the user down for more information or to speak to them

6. It frees up more skilled resource from support to deal with ‘other important stuff’ i.e. projects, strategy, demand, etc

Unfortunately what we often see though, is that once the Service Desk are achieving the FTF target, it’s not continually stretched. Consequently, the impetus on Shift-Left generally reduces, as the visible requirement to drive more fixes at first contact has been ‘achieved’. This however is a big fail and for the reasons outlined above, Shift-Left should be constant.

Why? - because we should always be looking for opportunities to move resolution into 1st line, or ultimately into zero level support, i.e. letting the users resolve things themselves.

Usually this means working with 2nd and 3rd line resolvers to identify which fixes we could comfortably give to 1st Line to resolve (taking into account skills, permissions etc). In addition, publishing knowledge articles for ‘self-help’ for certain Incidents and Requests to a service portal, presenting tools to them such as password reset tools, software delivery options and so on.

Or sometimes, this could be ‘self-healing’ technology and without wanting to endorse any particular vendors here, there are of course all sorts of tools on the market that magically resolve End User Compute related issues before the end user actually sees them. The same of course applies for Cloud, Infrastructure, Applications, or Database Services.

None of this Zero Level or self-healing stuff is particularly new and if anything, we are now faced with even more opportunities to automate, be that proactively before the user is impacted by something, or by giving the user themselves the opportunity to fix things via a Service Portal, with endless opportunities we are now seeing with automation and AI.

Now dont get us wrong, we're not suggesting to replace the Service Desk with Chat Bots, in fact, we dont like Chat Bots very much. We've seen a great deal more bad than good and more often than not, leading to huge frustration with end users. However, if automation is done right, it's powerful stuff for sure!

So here’s the thing.. is it now possible that treating the FTF as the ‘holy grail’ of Service Desk resolution performance is just distracting us from something much more important?

We are not suggesting of course to ignore FTF, as it still plays its part. But it would surely be a much more powerful (or additional) measure to look at the percentage of tickets either prevented completely, or resolved by the users themselves. Thus, reducing the scope and need to First Time Fix at all, as the tickets never even reach the Service Desk.

In fact, we might want to think twice about putting those high FTF SLA achievements up in lights in the Service Desk reporting, without reference to a review of automation possibilities? as those more tech savvy IT and business leaders might just start asking you why on earth we aren’t automating this stuff these days?

So, is FTF actually such a powerful measure these days after all?

I’m sure there’s lots of forward thinking mature Service Desks doing this, but for those that aren’t, maybe consider also measuring Shift Left and the percentage of tickets moved from 3rd line to 2nd line, 2nd line to 1st line, and 1st line to 0.

After all, whilst great to have a high FTF rate and it shows some good effort in shifting left and most likely a decent user experience, what is more powerful than telling the IT and business stakeholders of Incidents that you fixed even faster, even cheaper, or more importantly, automated or prevented completely?