More sophisticated statistics can be gathered about a helpdesk. You can monitor the rate of escalations to determine where more training is needed. However, when dealing with upper management for budgeting and planning purposes, historical statistics become much more valuable. You can make a better case for your budget if you can show multiyear trends of customer growth, call volume, types of calls, technologies, services provided, and customer satisfaction. When being asked to support a new technology or service, you can use past data to predict what the support costs may be.
The value of statistics increases as the organization grows, because the management becomes less directly involved in the work being done. It is often difficult to collect statistics in small organizations, because practices are often less automated and can’t be instrumented to collect data. As an organization grows, statistics are easier to collect, and it becomes more important that they be collected.