Measuring VIP Support Without a Separate Desk

Monday, 11:05, at Hollins Dairy. Nadia runs the desk of four and has just come out of her monthly half-hour with Ben, the chief operating officer. He signed the VIP charter in the spring and asked her, in passing, a question she could not answer: "How much of your team's time goes on the executive floor?" She said she would find out. Back at her desk she opens the queue and finds that she has no VIP queue, no VIP report and no VIP technician. That is because the charter said there would not be one. The only thing marking the executive tickets is a tag that Meera applies at triage and that nobody has ever counted. She has a feeling it is "a couple of hours a week". She has had that feeling for a year, and it has never been checked against anything.

Measuring VIP support is reading the same queue's numbers for the tickets that carry the marker, beside the same numbers for everyone else. It means putting the difference and the cost in hours on one line of the monthly report. There is no separate desk, no separate queue and no separate report, because the first article in this series said there would not be. And a separate anything makes the comparison impossible. The whole point of the measurement is to see what the handling costs and what it buys against the ordinary queue. That needs both in one place. This article is part of our VIP & Executive Support series, and it is about turning Nadia's feeling into a number Ben can act on.

It covers the VIP tickets as a cut of the same queue, then the numbers to cut and the ones to leave alone. Next comes the response reality against the ordinary queue, as a worked example. We cover the cost in hours, as a second worked example, then the side effects to watch: the displaced ticket and the executive technician. We cover what the numbers cannot tell you. We finish with the honest line in the report, a short war story, and the VIP report line to copy.

The VIP Tickets as a Cut of the Same Queue

A cut is a filter applied to the whole queue that keeps only the tickets with some property. That way, the same numbers can be read for that subset and compared with the rest. The property here is the marker from No Shadow SLA: a tag, a requester field, a group, or a subject-line convention. It is applied at triage to every ticket from a person on the charter list or their assistant. The cut is only as good as the marker. So the first job of measuring is to check that the marker is applied every time. Nadia's first hour was spent reading a month of tickets from the six roles on the list and finding four that Meera had not tagged. They had come in by chat and been worked before triage saw them. Four in thirty-eight is enough to move the numbers. The fix was a line in the triage checklist, not a reprimand.

Everything else is the ordinary method. The month's tickets are counted the same way the desk already counts them, with the same date rule, the same exclusions and the same unit. And the method is in Counting Tickets Properly, which this article leans on rather than repeats. The only addition is one column: marked or not. Every number below is then read twice, once for the marked rows and once for the rest, and the report line is the two readings side by side. If the desk's tool reports volume, first response and resolution times from the queue, as QuerySolv and most tools do, the cut is a filter on those reports. If it does not, it is a column in the monthly export and a spreadsheet with two tabs. Either way, nothing new is being measured. The same numbers are being read for a smaller set.

The ticket is the unit, and the marked tickets include the assistants' own tickets if the charter says so. They include the event tickets for board days, and the check-in tickets if the desk logs them as tickets. It should, because a check-in that is not a ticket is time that is not counted. The marked set will be small, somewhere between one in ten and one in twenty of the queue on most desks. Small sets need care: a month's figure for thirty tickets moves when two of them are unusual. So read quarters as well as months and never read a single month on its own as a trend.

The Numbers to Cut, and the Ones to Leave Alone

Five numbers are worth cutting and each answers a question Ben might ask. Volume, marked against total, answers how much of the desk's work the list generates. Time to first human reply, median and a high percentile, answers whether the handling the charter promised is being delivered. Time to resolution, the same way, answers whether the executive's problems are being fixed faster, which the charter did not promise and which is worth knowing. Hours logged, from the time recorded on the tickets, answers what the handling costs. And the displaced count is the number of marked tickets worked ahead of a higher-priority ticket that was open at the same time. It answers whether the marker is leaking into the priority, and it is the one number that must be near zero.

Two numbers are worth leaving alone. Satisfaction scores for the marked set are a sample of a dozen replies from six people, which is not a measurement, and the reasons are in a later section. And first contact resolution for the marked set is distorted by the handling itself: a visit resolves on first contact almost by definition, and the figure will be flattering and meaningless. Report the five, leave the two, and resist adding a sixth because it would look good on a chart. A VIP cut with twelve numbers is a VIP dashboard, and a VIP dashboard is a separate desk with a different name.

Read the first-reply number as the charter wrote it: a human reply, by phone or in person, not an automated acknowledgement. Most tools measure first response as the first message from the desk, which includes the automatic one. So the marked set's first-reply figure comes from the first technician note or call logged on the ticket. Or the desk accepts that the tool's number is a proxy and says so on the report line. Nadia used the first technician note. It cost her ten minutes a month and gave her a number she could defend.

The Response Reality Against the Ordinary Queue

The response reality is what the marker actually buys in minutes, read from the tickets rather than from the charter. The table below is Nadia's first month at Hollins Dairy, a desk of four with a queue of about five hundred and twenty tickets a month. Thirty-eight carried the marker once the four missing tags were added. Every figure is from that one fictional desk and that one month; a different desk will have different numbers. And the point of the table is the shape of the comparison, not the values.

The table answers the question the charter raised and never settled, which is whether the handling is what the page says or something else. A marked median of seven minutes against a promise of "within fifteen" is the charter being kept. A marked median of seven minutes against an ordinary median of three hours would be a different finding: not that the list is served well but that everyone else is served badly. In that case, the honest report line would say so. And a marked median of forty minutes would mean the charter is a page nobody reads. The comparison is what makes the number mean anything. On its own, seven minutes is just a number that sounds quick.

The displaced count is read ticket by ticket, because it is small. Two marked tickets in the month were worked while a higher-priority ticket for someone else was open. One has an override note from Nadia with a reason in grid words, and the other does not. The second one is a five-minute conversation with the technician who did it, which is coaching rather than a reprimand. The conversation is the whole of the monthly check that keeps the shadow from regrowing. A displaced count that rises for two months running is the marker leaking into the priority. And the fix is the previous article's rule, re-read aloud.

The Cost in Hours: A Worked Example

Hours are the currency, because the desk can count them and Ben can convert them. The cost of VIP support is four kinds of hours added together. These are the time logged on the marked tickets, the time on check-ins, the time on event preparation, and the time keeping the loaner ready. Nadia's month, from the same fictional desk, comes out like this. The thirty-eight marked tickets carried twenty-seven logged hours, an average of a little over forty minutes each, against about forty-eight minutes for the ordinary queue. The marked tickets were not slower to handle, which surprised her, because the visits are offset by the fact that executive tickets are rarely the hard ones. The check-ins, six assistants every three weeks at ten minutes each plus travel on the lift, came to about three hours logged as a standing ticket. The one board meeting that quarter cost six hours, which is two a month averaged. The loaner took an hour to keep patched and signed in. The total is somewhere between thirty-two and thirty-four hours in the month. Against a desk of four with roughly five hundred productive hours, that is about one hour in sixteen, for about one ticket in fourteen.

Nadia's feeling had been "a couple of hours a week", which is eight or nine a month. The real figure was nearly four times that. And the gap is where most of the value of measuring lies: not in the number itself but in the correction of a feeling that had been guiding decisions for a year. Thirty-three hours a month is not a scandal; it is the cost of the handling the charter describes, delivered as written. But it is a cost, and it is now visible. When the next department head asks to be added to the list, Nadia can say what one more role costs. That is roughly five hours a month on this desk's figures. Ben can decide with a number in front of him.

State the figure as a range and say what it excludes. It excludes the unlogged corridor fix and the question answered in the lift. It also excludes the time the second technician spent covering the first one's queue during a board morning. The tickets hold none of those. A desk that wants those in the number has to log them, a rule this library repeats wherever it counts anything: log the walk-up. It also excludes nothing from the ordinary queue's side, which is the point. The cost of VIP support is the hours it takes from a desk that has a fixed number of them. And the ordinary queue is where those hours would otherwise have gone.

The Side Effects: The Displaced Ticket and the Executive Technician

Two side effects do not show in the marked set and have to be looked for in the rest. The first is the displaced ticket, which is the ordinary ticket that waited because a technician was on the executive floor. It shows up as the ordinary queue's first-reply time on days with marked visits against days without. Nadia read it as two medians: forty-one minutes overall, fifty-three on the eleven days with a visit, thirty-six on the others. The handling is being paid for by the ordinary queue on visit days, by about a quarter of an hour at the median. That is a fact to report rather than a failing. It is what the rota from the previous article is designed to reduce. Under that rota, the technician who steps upstairs is the one whose queue can wait. If the gap grows, the rota is not being followed.

The second is the executive technician, the one person who ends up handling most of the marked set because the assistants ask for them by name. And it shows up in the per-technician cut of the marked tickets. Of Nadia's thirty-eight, Meera had twenty-six, Tom had nine and the other two technicians had three between them. That is a hero forming, with all the costs a hero carries: Meera cannot take leave on a board week, and Tom is the named second technician in name only. And the assistants have learned that "Meera" is the desk's VIP service. The per-technician figure is read for exactly this purpose and no other: it is coaching and rota information, never a ranking. And it is not read at all from fewer than thirty or so marked tickets across a quarter. At a month's volume the split between two people is mostly which of them was on triage.

The cure for the executive technician is to rotate on purpose. Tom takes every marked ticket for a month while Meera covers his queue. The assistants are told in advance by the check-in, and the arrangement notes are checked for anything only Meera knew. The split should drift toward even over two quarters. It will never be even, because assistants have preferences and so do technicians. The aim is that either named technician could take any marked ticket tomorrow, not that the count is symmetrical.

What the Numbers Cannot Tell You

The numbers do not tell you whether the executives are satisfied. And the satisfaction survey will not either, because six people and their assistants produce a dozen ratings a month, most of them from the same two assistants. A dozen ratings is a conversation, not a sample. Have the conversation instead. Once a quarter, the desk lead asks each assistant three questions in the check-in: what has worked, what has not, and what the executive has said about the desk, if anything. Write the answers in the quarterly ticket, unattributed, and read them beside the numbers. Assistants are precise critics and generous with praise when it is earned, and three questions a quarter will tell the desk more than a rating widget ever has.

The numbers also do not see the handling that never became a ticket: the fix in the corridor, the question at the lift, the quiet word with the assistant. Those are real work with a real cost. And the only way they enter the numbers is to be logged, after the fact, as one-line tickets with the marker on them. A desk that logs its hallway for a month usually finds the marked set a fifth larger than it thought, which is the number it should have been reporting all along.

And the numbers do not tell you whether the list is right. That is the sponsor's judgement, made at the review with the numbers in front of them. And the measurement's job is to make the judgement an informed one. Here is what six roles cost, what each one costs, and what the handling buys them. Here are the names whose reasons from the charter in What VIP Support Is, and Is Not may no longer hold. A role that generated one marked ticket in a quarter, with no event and no travel, is a role the sponsor may want to take off the list. The numbers raise the question. The sponsor answers it.

The Honest Line in the Report

The monthly report to leadership is one page with a handful of numbers and a short account of what changed. And the format belongs to The Monthly Report They Will Actually Read. VIP support gets one line on it, no more. The line says the volume, the hours, the first-reply comparison, the displaced count and whether the list changed. Nadia's read: "VIP support: 38 tickets (about 1 in 14), 33 hours (about 1 in 16 of desk hours), first human reply 7 minutes against 41 for everyone else, 2 worked ahead of a higher priority (1 recorded), list of 6 roles unchanged." One sentence, five facts, every one of them checkable in the queue.

The line is honest in both directions. It says what the handling costs, which leadership may not have known, and it says what it buys, which they may not have believed. The numbers may be uncomfortable: a displaced count of six, a marked median of forty minutes against a promised fifteen, an executive technician carrying nine tickets in ten. In that case, the line says so, with the reason and what the desk is doing about it, in the manner of When the Numbers Are Bad. A VIP line that is always fine is a line nobody will read. And the one month it needs to be read is the month after six fine ones. The quarterly review of the list uses the same line summed over three months, with the per-role breakdown beneath it. The sponsor re-signs the charter or amends it with the figures in hand.

Do not put the VIP line on a chart of its own, and do not put it first. It is one cut of the desk's work among several, and it concerns six people. Giving it a page would tell leadership that the desk thinks the executive floor is the main event. That is exactly the belief the charter was written to correct. Report it beside the password tickets and the printer tickets, in the same font, and let the number speak at its own size.

A Short War Story: The Forty Hours at Wexley Estates

At Wexley Estates, a property firm with a desk of five, the desk lead, Carys, had told the finance director for two years that executive support took "a few hours a week" whenever the budget came up. When a new chief operating officer asked for the figure in writing she cut the marked tickets from the queue for the first time. She found forty-one hours in the previous month. Twenty-six of them were on a list that had grown to fourteen names, and thirty of them were logged by one technician, Idris. He had not taken a full week's leave in a year because the assistants would not accept anyone else. The chief operating officer read the cut, asked for the reason beside each of the fourteen names, and found that six had none that anyone could state. The list went to five roles. Idris was rotated off executive work for a quarter with the assistants told why. And the forty-one hours became seventeen within two months, with the ordinary queue's first-reply time improving on visit days by a margin Carys had never thought to measure. The cost of two years of "a few hours a week" was, by her own later estimate, somewhere over five hundred hours of handling that nobody had decided to spend. A feeling about hours is not a number, and the person who signs the budget deserves the number.

The VIP Report Line

The template below is the monthly working sheet that produces the report line, in three parts. These are the cut, which is the five numbers read twice; the hours, in four kinds; and the line itself, with the quarterly addition for the review. It is filled in from the queue once a month in about half an hour, and the only line that leaves the desk is the last one. Keep the sheets; when the list is reviewed, the quarter's three sheets are the evidence, and when a number is questioned a year later, the sheet is the answer.

THE VIP REPORT LINE — MONTHLY WORKING SHEET
Desk: ______________________   Month: ____________   Prepared by: ______________

A. THE CUT (same queue, same counting rules; marked = charter list and their assistants)
   Marker checked against the list for the month: [ ]   Tickets missing the marker, now added: ____
                                        Marked        Everyone else
   Tickets                              ______        ______      (marked share: about 1 in ____)
   First human reply, median            ______        ______      (first technician note or call)
   First human reply, slowest tenth     ______        ______
   Time to resolution, median           ______        ______
   Worked ahead of a higher priority    ______   of which with an override note: ______
   Hours logged on tickets              ______        ______

B. THE HOURS (four kinds; state as a range; say what is excluded)
   Ticket hours (from A)                           ______
   Check-ins (standing ticket)                     ______
   Event preparation (event tickets this month)    ______
   Loaner and kit upkeep                           ______
   Total: between ______ and ______ hours, of about ______ productive desk hours (1 in ____)
   Excluded: unlogged walk-ups [ ] queue cover during events [ ] other: ______________

C. THE SIDE EFFECTS
   Ordinary-queue first reply, median: visit days ______ / other days ______
   Marked tickets by technician (quarter to date, coaching only, not read below 30):
   ______________ ____   ______________ ____   others ____      Rotation due: yes / no

D. THE LINE (one sentence, five facts, for the monthly report)
   "VIP support: ____ tickets (about 1 in ____), ____ hours (about 1 in ____ of desk hours),
    first human reply ____ minutes against ____ for everyone else, ____ worked ahead of a
    higher priority (____ recorded), list of ____ roles ______________ (unchanged / changed: ____)."
   If any figure is uncomfortable, add: the reason ______________; what the desk is doing ______________

E. QUARTERLY ADDITION (for the list review with the sponsor)
   Role                      Tickets    Hours    Events    Reason from the charter still holds?
   ______________________    ______     ______   ______    yes / no / unsure
   ______________________    ______     ______   ______    yes / no / unsure
   ______________________    ______     ______   ______    yes / no / unsure
   Assistants' three answers (what worked / what did not / what the executive said): in ticket ________
   Charter re-signed by sponsor: [ ]   Names removed: ____   Names added (with reason): ____

Nadia sent Ben the line on the Wednesday, with the sheet attached. One sentence said the figure was higher than the "couple of hours" she had told him in the spring, because she had now counted it. He asked what one more role would cost. She said about five hours a month, on the desk's own figures. He asked whether the list was right. She said that was his call, and that two of the six roles had generated one ticket each all quarter. The list went to five that afternoon. It was the first time anyone at Hollins Dairy had taken a name off it, and it took a number to do it.

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