Category: Service Desk

The Service Desk in the Age of Digitalization and AI

    Jim D

When I published the original Service Desk posts, it was more than a few years ago and since then we have seen great progress in digitalization. Importantly, technologies including advanced analytics and AI have also been introduced into the business mainstream. While much of the best practices that Steve Wignall, Bob Barnes and myself detailed still hold true, there are important new advances that can and should be leveraged. These new advances coupled with strong implementation of foundational practices can substantially improve the quality and cost of your service desk.

In the era of digitalization, the service desk has actually increased in importance as it is the human touch the remains easiest to reach in time of trouble by your users or customers. These advances in technology though can be used to improve the accessibility of the interface. For example, no longer is the service desk, just a phone interface. Now, especially with external customer desks, the interface includes chat and email. And this communication can also be ‘proactive’ where you reach out to the customer versus ‘reactive’ where you wait for them to call or chat. A proactive chat message being offered to the customer when they are hovering or waiting on an internet interface can be an excellent helping hand to your customers. Allowing them to easily reach out to your service team and obtain information or assistance that enables the to complete their transaction. Commercial results can be extremely beneficial as you reduce ‘dropout rates’ on important transactions. And overall, given such proactive chats are typically seen as unobtrusive and helpful, you can greatly improve the customer experience and satisfaction.

Further, advances in data analytics and artificial intelligence yield new capabilities from voice authentication to interactive, natural voice menus to AI actually answering the customer questions. Below are the details of these techniques and suggestions on how best to leverage these technologies.  Importantly, remember that the service desk is a critical human interface during those service ‘moments of truth’, and must be a reliable and effective channel that works as a last resort. Thus, the technology is not a replacement for the human touch, but an augment to knowledgeable personnel who are empowered to provide the services your customers need.  If your staff are without such skills and authority, a technologically savvy service desk will only compound your customers’ frustration with your services and miss opportunities to win in the digital age.

As a start, and regardless of whether an internal or external service desk, the service desk model should be based on ITIL and I recommend you start with this base of knowledge on service management. With that foundation in mind, below we cover the latest techniques and capabilities you should incorporate into your desk.

Proactive Chat: Proactive chat can greatly lift the performance of your customers’ interaction with your website and not just by reducing abandons on a complex web page.  You can use it for customers lingering over FAQs and help topics or assist customers arriving from other sites with known campaign referrals. Good implementations avoid bothering the customer when they first get on your page or when they are speeding through a transaction. Instead, you approach the customer as a non-intrusive but helpful presence armed with the likely question they are asking themselves. Such accessibility is key to enable the best customer service and avoid ‘dropouts’ on your website or mobile app. Easy to access chat from your web site or mobile app can substantially improve customer completion rates on services. Improved completion rates (and thus increased revenues) alone can often justify the cost of excellent chat support. There are several vendors offering good products to integrate with your website and service desk and you can find a good quick reference on proactive chat practices here.  And the rewards can be significant with 30 to 50% reduced abandons and much higher customer satisfaction.

Voice Authentication and Natural Language: Another technology that has advanced substantially in the past few years is voice authentication. Of course, biometrics in general has advanced broadly from fingerprint to face recognition now being deployed in everyday devices — to varying degrees of effectiveness. Voice authentication is one of the more mature biometric areas and has been adopted by many institutions to authenticate users when they call in. Voice authentication can be done either in active (e.g. using a set passphrase) or in passive mode (the user speaks naturally to the call center representative and after a period of time is either authenticated or rejected). Some large financial services companies (e.g., Barclays) have been deployed this for 2 years or more, with very high customer satisfaction results and reductions in impersonation or fraud. I recommend a passive implementation as it seems less likely to be ‘cracked’ (there is no set passphrase to record or impersonate with) and it results in a more natural human conversation. Importantly, it reduces the often lengthy time spent authenticating a customer and the representative does not ask the sometimes inane security questions of a customer which only further annoys them. Voice authentication along with traditional ANI schemes (where you use the originating number to identify the customer and their most recent information, requests or transactions are provided to the service agent) enables more certain authentication as well as the ability to immediately launch into the issue or service the customer is trying to achieve.

In addition, there is a growing use of using spoken or even ‘natural language’ to replace traditional IVR menus using touchtones (e.g. instead ‘Push 1 for Billing’, ‘tell us the nature of your call – is it related to billing, or to your order delivery, or another topic?’). Unfortunately, these can often result in a IVR maze (or even ‘hell’) for some customers when they use an usual phrase or their words are not recognized. And given there is no easy way out (e.g. ‘push 0 for an agent’), you end up frustrating your customers even more. I would be very cautious on implementing such systems as they rarely contribute to the customer experience or to efficiency.

Improved analytics and AI:  Analytics is an area that has advanced dramatically over the past 2 years. The ability to combine both your structured transaction data with additional big data from web logs to social media information means you can know much more about your customers when they call in. As advantageous as this can be, ensure first you have a solid customer profile in place that allows your agents to know all of the basics about your customer. Next layer in all recent activity in other channels – web, mobile, chat. Then supplement with suggestions such as next best product or service recommendations or upgrades based on customer characteristics or similar customer actions. You can substantially increase customer confidence by showing ‘Customers like you …. ‘.  Of course, you must leverage such data in accordance with regulatory requirements (e.g. GDPR) and in a transparent way that gives the customer the confidence that you are protecting their data and using it to provide better solutions and service for them. This is paramount, because if you lose the customer trust with their data, or appear ‘creepy’ with your knowledge, then you are ruining the customer experience you wish to provide.

Only after you have a robust customer data foundation and can demonstrate improved customer services utilizing analytics should you consider exploring AI bots. Without the customer information, AI bots are actually just ‘dumb’ bots that will likely annoy your customer.  And the recent pilots I have seen of AI capabilities have only handled the easiest questions after a huge amount of work to implement and train. Of course, I would expect this technology to improve rapidly in the coming years and their commercial proposition to become better.

Agent/Customer Matching : One other method to optimize service is through agent/customer matching where either with an automated tool or through active customer selection agents are matched to customers. The matching can occur based on emotional, experience, or other dimensions. The result is a better experience for the customer and likely a better connection with your company.

Service optimization and demand reduction: While certainly a fundamental capability, service optimization (where you use to data from the calls to proactively adjust your services and interfaces to eliminate the need for the call in the first place) becomes even more powerful when you combine it with additional data from all of your channels and the customer. You can identify root causes for calls and eliminate them better than ever. Using Pareto analysis, you can look into your most frequent calls and understand what are the defects, product problems, process gaps, or web page issues that your customers or internal users are experiencing — especially when bounced up against web logs that show how the customer navigates (or is unable to) your pages. The service desk team should then run a crisp process with management sponsorship to ensure the original issues are corrected. This can reduce your incident or problem calls by 20, 30 or even 40%. Not only do you get the cost reduction from the reduced calls, but more importantly, you greatly reduce the problems and annoyances your customers or staff experience. You optimize the services you provide and ensure a smoother customer experience through the ongoing execution of such a feedback loop. We have used to great effect within the Danske Bank IT service desk in the past two years enabling us to offer far better service at lower cost. Attached is a diagram representing the process: Demand Reduction.   Of course, credit goes fully to the team (Dan, Ona, and many others) for such successful development and execution of the practice.

So, that is our quick survey of new technologies to support the service desk in the digital age. As I noted at the beginning, you should make sure you have a solid foundation in your service centers before moving to the advanced technology. There’s no substitute for doing the basics right, and the business return on investments in the latest technologies will often be minimal until they are in place. For a quick reference on all of the foundational practices please see the service desk summary page, and  make sure you review the material on the key ingredient: service desk leadership.

Best, Jim Ditmore

IT Service Desk: Turning around a ‘helpless’ desk

    Steve Wignall
In one of our earliest posts on service desks, I mentioned how an inherited service desk had delivered such poor service that it was referred to by users as the ‘Helpless Desk’ rather than the Help Desk. With that in mind, for those IT leaders who have a poor service situation on your hands with your most important customer interface, this post outlines how to stabilize and then turnaround your service desk. For those new to this site, there is a service desk reference page and also posts to understand service desk elements and best practices.
Service Desks can underperform for a number of reasons, but ongoing poor performance is generally due to a confluence of causes. Typically, underlying issues thrust service desks into poor performance when combined with major changes to the supply (or agent service) or the demand (the calls and requests coming into the desk).  It is important to recognize that service desks are in essence call centres. Call Centre performance is driven by the supply and demand, with an effective service at an efficient cost representing equilibrium – the point at which the competing forces of supply and demand are in optimized with each other. A supply side or demand side ‘shock’ can move the state of equilibrium to a point outside of management control and if there are other fundamental issues, it will result in sustained underperformance by the Service Desk.

There is a ‘tipping point’ within Call Centre mechanics which means that the rate of deterioration will become exponential  – i.e., the gentle gradient of deterioration does not last long before service falls over the cliff edge (i.e. wait times in seconds, quickly become minutes and then tens of minutes – even hours). Calls are abandoned by customers, with call backs adding further volume. Agents become overworked and stressed due to the tone of the calls, their efficiency reduces and attrition goes up, exacerbating any supply shortage. These dynamics also work in reverse and so what can seem to be an insurmountable problem can in fact be rapidly returned to stability if managed appropriately.

Common supply side issues include:

  • Organisations increasingly use headcount caps and quotas to control their cost base. As the quota filters through the organisation, there can be a tendency to retain ‘higher end’ roles, which means the Service Desk comes under particular scrutiny and challenge. A reduction in the supply of labour (without equivalent changes in demand) can very quickly lead to significant service deterioration.
  • Similarly, Service Desk tends to be a function in which organisations have an uplifted appetite to make organisational changes to outsource and offshore (and similarly insource and onshore as the cycle runs). The wholesale replacement of the Service Desk workforce is a fairly common scenario within the industry and is frequently the root cause of acute service issues in the run up to change (as attrition without replacement bites) and during and post change (as a new workforce struggles to support their new customer base).
  • Any issue / initiative that either reduces the availability of agents to handle live calls or leads to a significant increase in the transaction time to do so can very quickly have a catastrophic impact on service. For example; the implementation of a new Service Management toolset is likely to elongate call duration in the short to medium term, a call centre with a high attrition rate will constantly lose agents just as they start to perform – to be replaced by a trainee performing at a sub optimal level and a call centre operating at too high an occupancy level will quickly burn out staff and have an increasing level of absenteeism.

Demand side issues commonly include;

  • Growth of the user base, generating an uplifted volume of contacts to the Service Desk.
  • An increase in contacts per supported user, driven by increasing IT usage or deterioration of IT performance (this is frequently driven by Business or IT change activity delivered by Projects and Programmes – such as the deployment of a new application to the workforce).

Irrespective of the root cause of the failure, service remediation needs to be a concerted effort combining strong analysis with disciplined planning and focused execution. Identifying that there is an issue and responding appropriately in a timely manner should happen automatically if you are already operating with maturity from fact based metrics that have a healthy mix of lead and lag indicators. If the organisation is less mature in its use of metrics (and particularly lead indicators) then the ‘crisis’ is not likely to be noticed (or at least taken seriously by senior leadership) until after the Service Desk hits the tipping point and service is deteriorating at an alarming pace, generating severe customer dissatisfaction (i.e. until it is too late).

Remediating a failing Service Desk requires multiple and varied actions dependent upon the root cause of the issues. The approach to identifying and rectifying those root causes can be managed effectively by following a logical framework.

Step 1 – Stabilize

If service has tumbled over the tipping point and is deteriorating rapidly, there is going to be little sponsorship for an extended analysis and planning exercise. Results – or at least avoiding further deterioration of performance – will be expected immediately. Your first priority is to create the space to put together a meaningful recovery plan.

Do everything that you can do to boost the supply side in the short term (overtime / shift amendments / cessation of any non-time critical, non-customer contact work by your agents, boost the number of agents by diverting resources to customer service roles from other positions etc, bring in temporary resources, etc). This will not fix the issue and is not a sustainable containment strategy; it will however create the window of opportunity you require and give a much needed boost to stakeholder confidence that the ‘freefall’ may be over. By itself, it will reduce the cycle of abandons and call backs that create additional work for the team.

Similar attention should be paid to any demand side actions that can be deployed quickly, it is less likely however that you can act immediately on the demand side, but there are steps that can be taken quickly. If there are recent system or application rollouts that are generating questions and calls, it may be worthwhile to send out a FAQ or Quick Tips to help employees understand what to do without calling the service desk. Or any self help initiatives already in the pipeline could be accelerated to remove some calls. While these actions are more likely to form elements of your strategic recovery plan, the may provide some level of relief.

Step 2 – Undertake the Analysis

Your leadership group and analysts need to undertake the analysis to understand why service has deteriorated. What has gone wrong, when, where and why? If your desk has been performing well (or even adequately) for some time, remember that a recent ‘change’ in either the demand or supply side is likely to be the root cause.

If the desk has been underperforming for a significant period, there are likely to be more systemic causes of the failure and so a full strategic review of your operations is required. Reading the full set of Service Desk Best Practices published within Recipes for IT will provide guidance on the areas of focus required.

After understanding your call volumes and their trends (everything from call time to why customers are calling) you should be able to identify some of the root causes. Are there new issues that are now in the top 10 call reasons? Are your call times elongated? Have call volumes or peaks increased? For each shift in metrics, analyze for the following:

  • determine if the root cause for a customer call is due to:
      • system issues or changes
      • user training or understanding
      • lack of viable self-service channel
  • identify if increases in calls are due to:
      • underlying user volume increases or growth
      • new user technologies or systems
      • major rollouts or releases that are problematic
  • or if service is suffering due to:
      • lack of resources or mismatched resource levels and call volumes
      • inadequate training of service desk personnel
      • new or ineffective toolsets that elongate service time
      • inefficient procedures or poor engagement
      • high attrition or loss of personnel

If you do not have adequate metrics to support the analysis, then you will need to establish basic metrics collection as the first, fundamental step.

Step 3 – Construct the Recovery Plan

Constructing the recovery plan needs to be genuinely solution-oriented and outcome focused. The objective of the plan is not usually to resolve the source of the ‘shock’ to return us back to the old equilibrium (e.g. we aren’t likely to want to back out the new Service Management toolset that we have just implemented – we will want to build forward). The objective of the plan is to detail the actions required to resolve the issues identified as well as build a solid foundation to allow us to move back to a steady state operation, delivering with quality and consistency to our SLA.

A good recovery plan will be clear about what actions are to be undertaken, by who, when, to achieve which specific deliverable and with specific measures and metrics tracking progress to achievement of the overall outcome.

The plan needs to focus on prioritising actions that can make a positive impact of scale and of pace commensurate to the scale of the service issues being experienced. Many and multiple actions on a service recovery plan creates a false sense of comfort for those involved in the crisis and will almost certainly hinder genuine service improvement. Targeted action is required and this needs discipline and skill from the plan owner to ensure that benefits will be realised, will be relevant to the problem statement and that our actions in aggregate will move bottom line performance to where we need it to be.

We recommend a recovery plan that has the following elements:

a. Maintain an interim staffing boost to stabilize the service desk until other work is completed

b. If clear problem causes are identified (poorly rolled out systems, ongoing defective systems causing high volumes of calls) then ensure these areas are high priority for fixes on the next release or maintenance cycle.

c. Match resources to demand cycles based on current volumes and call handle times. Then forecast proper resource levels based on improvement initiatives and their completion dates.

d. If self service can address a significant volume of calls, these should also be a top priority for investment as this solution is also usually an overall cost save as well as service experience improvement (e.g. password resets).

e. Ensure your service desk staff can efficiently handle calls — proper training, tool adjustments, thoughtful goals, incentives and a productive environment.

f. Address staff recruiting as well as development, incentives, and training and career progression to ensure you will have an engaged and well-trained staff to deliver exceptional service

g. Review your IVR and call centre technology setup and look to optimize menus, self-service, and call back options. Specialize resources into pools as appropriate to improve efficiency.

h. Define strategic service goals and SLAs along with initiatives to achieve them (e.g., additional or different sites, knowledge management tools, revamp of problem systems, etc).

Step 4 – Execute the Recovery Plan

Ensure that the plan is owned by an individual with the gravitas, influence, experience and focus to manage it through with real pace and drive. Ideally, the individual should not own actions within the plan itself (as this undermines their ability to hold everyone fully to account and removes their impartiality when inevitable conflicting priorities arise).

The plan can (and should) be meaningfully tuned as you progress with delivery. It should not however be a constant exercise in planning and re-planning and particular focus needs to be applied to ensure that commitments (delivery to time, cost and quality) are met by all action owners.

Communicate the issue, the plan, progress & improvement achieved to date and upcoming actions from your recovery plan to stakeholders. Ensure that stakeholder management is a specific activity within your plan and that you pay particular attention to each stakeholder group as a constituency. The role of senior leaders in recovery situations should be to protect the operations team to enable it to focus on delivery through the management of senior clients and customers and to ensure that the required resources to remediate the issues are provided.

Step 5 – Take a Look Back

Once service has been remediated and stabilised there are a number of residual actions to undertake.

  • As additional resources were utilised in the recovery effort (holidays restricted, time off in lieu accumulated, overtime paid etc…) there may well be negative service and / or financial implications of those decisions. It is important to quickly understand any such impacts and to manage them appropriately (e.g., review the holiday allocation process to ensure accumulated holidays can still be scheduled without a bottleneck, determine whether to grant time off in lieu for extra hours worked or to pay overtime, ensure that departments and functions who have been loaning staff to the front line receive support and resources to now clear their backlogs quickly etc.).
  • Review the control processes and responsiveness of your Service Desk in the identification of the issue / issues and how this could be improved upon in the future (in particular the use of lead and lag performance metrics). The ‘root causes’ identified should be eliminated or carefully tracked to ensure that future occurrences can be identified and dealt with before they manifest as service impact to your customers.
  • Ensure that the findings of your root cause analysis are communicated to and understood by your stakeholders. Be honest, be clear and be candid about what has happened, why and the measures that are now in place to prevent / mitigate any future such occurrences.
  • Say Thank You as the milestones are completed. A number of people will have participated in the recovery effort, some very explicitly and others in a very low key manner (for example by absorbing extra workload from colleagues seconded to the front line). Recognising their contribution and taking the time to say Thank You will ensure that your team feel rewarded for their efforts and motivated to stand shoulder to shoulder in tackling future adverse events that impact customer service.

And with these efforts, you will have turned the ‘helpless desk’ into a positive key interface for your customers.

Best, Steve Wignall and Jim Ditmore


IT Service Desk: Building a Responsive and Effective Desk

    Steve Wignall

This is the 4th in a series of posts on best practices in the IT Service Desk arena. To catch the previous material, you can check out the first post or you can read through the best practice reference pages on the the IT Recipes site. To help you best use this site, please know that as material is covered in the posts, we subsequently use it to properly build an ongoing reference area that can be used when you encounter a particular issue or problem area and are looking for how to solve it. There’s a good base of material in the reference area on efficiency and cost cutting, project management, recruiting talent, benchmarking, and now service desk. If you have any feedback on how to improve the reference area structure, don’t hesitate to let us know. We will be delivering one more post on service desk after this one and then I will be shifting to leadership techniques and building high performance teams.

One of the key challenges of the Service Desk is to respond to a customer transaction in a timely manner. Often, two situations occur: either efficiency or budget restrictions result in lengthened service times and poor perception of the service or the focus is purely on speed to answer and the initial interaction is positive but the end result is not highly effective. Meeting the customer expectations on timeliness, being cost effective, and delivering real value is the optimal performance that is our target.

Further, this optimal performance must be delivered in a complex environment. Timeliness must be handled differently for each activity (for example, the service for a significant production incident or service loss is handled as a ‘live’ telephone call, whereas an order for new equipment would be primarily submitted via a web form). The demand for the services is often 24 hours a day and global with multiple languages and interaction occurs over phone, web chat, and intranet (and soon, mobile app interfaces). This optimal performance should have both the cost and the effectiveness of the service desk measured holistically, that is, all the costs to deliver a service should be totaled including the end user and customer cost (e.g., wait time, restoration time, lost revenue opportunity, etc) and engineering time (e.g., time required to go back a gather data to deliver a service or time avoided if service is automated or handled by the service desk).

A great Service Desk not only delivers the operational numbers, it ensures that the workload flowing through the process is ‘value add’ activity that is required and necessary. The Service Desk must ensure that it measures performance as a cost / benefit to the whole organisation and not just in isolation. Doing the ‘right thing’ may actually move the narrower operational Service Desk metrics in the wrong direction; yet at the enterprise level it remains the right thing to do.

Optimize your service desk by managing demand and improving productivity

There are two primary factors that drive your service desk cost and delivery:

  • the number of calls and in particular the peak volume of calls, and,
  • the cost base of your service desk (mostly people costs: salary, benefits, taxes, etc

The volume and pattern of transaction demand is in turn the primary driver of the number of people required and is the key determinant of the overall cost base of the Service Desk. More specifically, the peak load of the Service Desk (the time at which call volumes are highest) is the time that drives your peak staffing volume and is therefore the most important target of demand reduction (i.e. the point that reductions in call / transaction volume are most likely to be realised as a financial cost saving or improved responsiveness to customers).

There are three key opportunities:

  • Mange the transaction volume
  • Manage the transaction pattern
  • Manage the transaction time

And in each opportunity area, we will look to apply best practices such that we improve the effectiveness of the service desk and IT experience overall.

Managing the Transaction Volume

Reducing the overall volume of transactions presented to the department reduces total workload. And while reducing the number of transactions is a good thing, these reductions may not be realised as cost savings or reduced customer wait times if they simply increase idle time during your quieter periods and do not reduce the peak load. The peak load is the point at which resourcing levels are at their highest and yet you are likely to have negative capacity (i.e. your customers will queue as you cannot resource fully to meet the peak). Eradicating demand even within troughs is valuable; however the true value is to focus on the peak. So start by identifying your key volume drivers and your peak load key volume drivers through statistical analysis. The use of Pareto analysis will usually demonstrate that a significant volume of your calls (+80%) are driven by a fairly small number of categories of call, sometimes the top 15 / 20 call types can account for as much as 80% of the total volume of calls. Then, for each call type impacting the peak, do the following analysis and actions:

  • Is it a chronic issue — meaning, is it a repetitive problem that users experience (i.e. Citrix is down every Monday morning, or new users are issued the wrong configuration to properly access data, etc)? If it is, then rank by frequency, missed SLAs and total cost (e.g. 200 users a week with the issue costing 2 hours of lost time is a $32,000/month problem). Allocate the investment based on SLA criticality and ROI and assign it to the appropriate engineering area to address with signoff by the service desk required when completed.
  • Is it a navigation or training issue? Having significant numbers of users call the service desk as a last resort to find out how to do something is an indicator that your systems or your intranet is not user friendly, intuitive or well-designed. Use these calls to drive navigation and design improvements for your systems and your intranet in each release cycle. Look to make it a normal input to improve usability of your systems.
  • Is it that requests can only be handled manually? As I have mentioned in previous posts, often the internal systems for employees (e.g. HR, Finance and IT) are the least automated and have manual forms and workflow. Look to migrate as much as possible to a self-serve, highly automated workflow approach. This particularly true for password administration. Unless you have full logical access automation, it is likely that User Administration and Password Management are key call drivers, particularly at peak as users arrive at work and attempt to log on to systems. Automation of password resets at an application / platform level is often achievable quickly and at a much lower cost than a fully integrated solution. Assign to your engineering and development teams so you can make significant peak load demand reductions with little or no investment and corresponding user experience improvement.
  • Can you automate or standardize? If you cannot automate then look to standardise wherever possible. For example, have the Service Desk work in partnership with your IT Security group and ensure that you adopt a corporate standard construction for passwords and log on credentials. This will result in users being less likely to lock themselves out of their accounts and reduce the peak load. And ensure the standards don’t go overboard on security. I once had a group where the passwords were changed for everyone every month. The result was 20,000 additional calls to the service desk because people forgot their passwords, and lax security because nearly everyone else was writing down their passwords. We changed it back to quarterly and saved $400,000 a quarter in reduced calls and made the users happy (and improved security).
  • Can you eliminate calls due to misdirection? Identify failure demand which are calls that are generated by weaknesses in the design or performance of support processes, including: wrong department / misdirected calls (or IVR choices), use of the Service Desk as a ‘Directory Enquiries’ function, repeat calls and chaser calls (i.e. where the customer hasn’t been able to provide all of the required details in one call or had to chase because their expectations have not been met). Failure demand should be eradicated through the re-design of support processes / services to eliminate multiple steps and common defects as well as improved customer communication and education.
  • Can you increase self service? Identify calls that could be resolved without the intervention of the Service Desk, i.e. through the use of alternative channels such as self service. Work with business lines and gain agreement to direct callers to the alternative (cheaper) channels. To encourage adoption, market the best channels and where necessary withdraw the services of the Service Desk to mandate the use of automation or self service solutions.
  • Is root cause addressed by the engineering teams? Undertake robust Problem Management processes and ensure that your engineering and application groups have clear accountabilities to resolve root cause issues and thus reduce the volume of calls into the Service Desk. A good way to secure buy in is to convert the call volumes into a financial figure and ensure the component management team has full awareness and responsibility to reduce these costs they are causing.
  • Can you streamline your online or intranet ticket creation and logging process? Organizations increasingly want to capture management information about technical faults that were fixed locally and it is not uncommon for business lines to request that a ticket is logged  just for management information purposes. Design your online ticket logging facility to be able to handle all of these transactions. Whilst such information is valuable, the Service Desk agent adds no value through their involvement in the transaction.
  • Do you have routing transactions that can have their entry easily automated?Consider reviewing operating procedures and identifying those transactions in which your agents undertake ‘check list’ style diagnosis before passing a ticket to resolver groups. In these instances, creating web forms (or templates within your Service Management toolset) enables the customer to answer the check list directly, raise their own ticket and then route directly to support.

Managing the Transaction Pattern

If workload cannot be eradicated (i.e. it is value-added work that must be done by the agent) then we next look to shift the work from peak to non-peak service times. Delivering service ‘at the point of peak customer demand’ is the most expensive way to deliver service as it increases the resource profile required and could build in high levels of latent non-productive time for your agents.

One technique to apply to shift the work from peak to non-peak is through customer choice. Leverage your IVR or your online self service ticketing systems to enable the customer to choose a call back option at non-peak times if they call in at peak. Many customer would prefer to  to select a specific time of service with certainty versus waiting an indeterminate amount of time for an agent. They can structure their workday productively around the issue. But you must ensure your team reliably calls back at the specified time.

Customer education around busy and quiet periods to call, messages on your IVR and even limiting some non-essential services to only being available during low demand hours will all help to smooth workflow and reduce the peak load. Further, providing a real-time systems production status toolbar on the intranet will minimize repeat call-ins for the same incident or status query calls.

You can also smooth or shift calls due to system releases and upgrades. Ensure that your releases and rollouts are scheduled at the with peak times in mind. A major rollout of a new system at the end of the month on a Monday morning when the service desk experiences a peak and there are other capacity stresses is just not well-planned.  Userids, passwords, and training should all be staged incrementally for a rollout to smooth demand and provide a better system introduction and resulting user experience. As a general rule doing a pilot implementation to gauge true user interaction (and resulting likely calls) is a good approach to identifying potential hotspots before wide introduction and fixing them.

Managing the Transaction Time

Transaction time can be improved in two ways:

  • improve the productivity and skill of the agent (or reduce the work to be done)
  • increase the resources to meet the demand thus reducing the wait time for the transactions.

Start by ensuring your hiring practices are bringing onboard agents with the right skills (technical, customer interface, problem-solving, and languages). Encourage agents to improve their skills through education and certification programs. Have your engineering teams provide periodic seminars on the systems of your firm and how they work. Ensure the service desk team is trained as part of every major new system release or upgrade.  Implement a knowledge management system that is initially written jointly by the engineering team and the service desk team. Enables comments and updates and hints to be added by your service desk agents. Ensure the taxonomy of the problems set is logical and easily navigated. And then ensure the knowledge base and operational documentation is updated for every major system release.

Another method to improve the productivity of your service desk is to capture the service and transaction data by the various service desk subteams (e.g., by region or shift, etc). There will be variation across the subteams, and you can use these variations to pinpoint potential best practices. Identifying and implementing best practice across your desk should lead to a convergence over time of call duration to an optimal number. Measuring the mean average and the standard deviation around the mean should demonstrate convergence over time if best practice is being embedded and used consistently across the workforce. Remember that just having the lowest service time per call may not be the optimal practice. Taking a bit longer on the call and delivering a higher rate of first call resolution is often a more optimal path.  Your agents with the longest call duration may be fixing more transactions; however it could be that some of these are too time consuming and should have been time-shifted as other customers are now being left to queue.

Managing transaction time has to be done very purposefully; otherwise quality is placed at risk. If agents believe they are under pressure to meet a certain transaction time, they will sacrifice quality to do so. This will result in re-work, reduced volumes of calls resolved at first point of contact and reduced customer satisfaction as they will receive inconsistent and reduced service. Transaction time has to be managed as a secondary measure to quality and resolution rates to prevent this from occurring. There should never be a stated deadline as to when a call has become too lengthy – each customer interaction has to be managed on its own merits and only in the aggregate (say a weekly or monthly average) can you fairly compare the delivery of your agents against each other.

Resource planning is the science of matching your supply of resources to meet the demand from the customer within a specified period of time (let’s say 20 seconds). Call Centres will usually manage their resource profile in 15 minute intervals. The mechanics of doing this is driven by probability – the probability of a call being presented within a 15 minute period (predicted using historical data gathered from your telephony) and the probability that an agent will become available within 20 seconds of the call being presented to answer that call. The ‘magic number’ of agents required in a 15 minute period is met when these probabilities are aligned so that we will meet the required level of service (e.g. 90% of calls will be answered in 20 seconds).

The volume of calls presented is one half of this equation, the frequency with which an agent becomes available is the other. Agents become available when they join the pool of active agents (i.e. when they sign in for a shift) or when they complete a call and are ready to receive the next call. The average transaction time (call length plus any additional time placing the agent in an unavailable state) determines how frequently they will become available in any given 15 minute period. A Call Centre with an average call duration of 2 ½ minutes will have each agent becoming available 6 times in a 15 minute period, whereas a call duration of 6 minutes will only have each agent becoming available 2 ½ times. The probability of an agent becoming available within the 20 second window in the first call centre is significantly higher and their resource requirements will therefore be much lower than the second. The right number for your business will be for you to determine. Then apply the best practice staffing approaches mentioned in our earlier posts. Recruit a talented team in the right locations and look to leverage part-time staff to help fulfill peak demand.

Here are a few best practice techniques for you to consider in managing the Transaction Time:

  • When calculating transaction time, ensure that you include not only the length of active talk time but also any other factor that makes the agent unavailable for the next call to be presented (e.g. any rest time that you have built into the telephony, any ‘wrap up’ time that the agent can manually apply to block other calls being presented etc…).
  • Present calls direct to agent headsets (i.e. a beep in the ear) rather than have their phones ring and require manually answering.
  • Analyse what the difference is between your best and worst performing agents, determine what best practice is and roll it out across the team. This may include everyone having access to the right applications on their desktop, having the right shortcuts loaded in their browsers, keeping high volume applications open rather than logging in when a relevant call is presented and a thousand other nuances that all add up to valuable seconds on a call.
  • Do a key stroke by key stroke analysis of how your agents use the Service Management toolset. Manage the logical workflow of a ticket, automate fields where possible, build templates to assist quick information capture and ensure that there is no wasted effort (i.e. that every key stroke counts). Ensure that support groups are not inflating call duration by requesting fields that are re-keyed in tickets for their own convenience.
  • Invest in developing professional coaching skills for your Team Leaders (you may even want to consider dedicated performance coaches) and embed call duration as an important element in your quality management processes. (Focusing on the length of call being right and appropriate for the circumstances and not just short). Coach staff through direct observation and at the time feedback.
  • Ensure that your performance metrics and rewards are aligned so that you reward quality delivery and your people have a clear understanding of the behaviours that you are driving. Ensure that performance is reviewed against the suite of measures (resolution, duration, quality sampling etc…) and not in isolation.
  • Build your checks and measures to keep the process honest. Measure and manage each element of the process to ensure that the numbers are not being manipulated by differences in agent behaviour. Run and check reports against short calls, agent log in / log out, abandoned calls and terminated calls. How agents use these statuses can fundamentally change their individual performance metrics and so it is the role of leaders to ensure that the playing field is level and that the process is not being subverted through negative behaviors.

On a final note on resource planning, if you have more than once central desk, look to consolidate your service desks. If you have different desks for different technologies or business areas, consolidating them will invariable lower cost and actually improve service. The economies of scale in call centers are very material, Further size and scale make it easier to run a Call Center that consistently deliver the quality, call response time and benchmarks favorable to the external market. Don’t let technology or business divisions sub-optimize this enterprise utility.

Effectively resourcing a Service Desk is about the application and manipulation of the laws of supply and demand. The Service Desk is not a passive victim of these forces and great Service Desks will be heavily focused on maximising the productivity, efficiency and effectiveness of the supply of labour. They will equally be managing their demand profile to ensure that all work is required and value add, workflow is managed to smooth demand away from peaks and that customers needs are satisfied through the most effective and efficient channels to deliver exceptional customer service.

We look forward to your thoughts or additions to these best practices for service desk.

Best, Steve and Jim

IT Service Desk: Delivering an Outstanding Customer Interface

    Steve Wignall

This is the 3rd in our series on IT service desk best practices. As we mentioned in our previous post, the Service Desk is the primary daily interface with IT customer. It is the front door into IT; however, the customer usually only comes knocking when something is already wrong. This means that from the outset, the service desk is often dealing with a customer who is frustrated and already having a sub-optimal experience of IT. How the service desk responds will largely determine not just the perception of the service desk but of IT as a whole. Turning the issue into a positive experience of IT can be done consistently and highly effectively if you have designed your support processes correctly and your agents are operating with the right attitude and with the right customer service framework.

Business is complex, IT is complex and the interface between the two (here, the service desk) is by definition also complex. Delivering great customer service however doesn’t have to be. We can distill the core requirements of your customer down to a small number of key behaviours that can be designed in to your services. Of course there is ‘the perfect world’ and some callers will expect this, however most people will have a set of reasonable expectations that are in line with decent ‘customer service’ transaction that they undertake. Their experience of call centers is likely to have been shaped by their dealings with retailers, utility companies (thank goodness) and airlines or holiday companies. Thus their consumer experience drives their expectations of the service desk much as consumer technology is doing the same for other parts of corporate IT.

With this in mind, a service that is constructed with basic ‘good manners’ goes a long way to consistently delivering the fundamentals of great customer service. Just as we expect individuals to demonstrate good manners, we can expect the same of the services that we design. These good manners include the following characteristics:

  • Be Available – Be there to service customers at the point of demand, through an appropriate channel, within an acceptable timeframe and when they need your help
  • Be Capable – Ensure the customer has their need satisfied within an acceptable period of time (ideally but not necessarily within a single transaction at first contact).
  • Be Responsible – Take ownership and don’t expect the customer to navigate the IT organisation, do it on their behalf. Be the customer advocate and hold the rest of the IT organisation to account to deliver the customer promise.
  • Be Truthful – Set expectations and keep your promises. Don’t promise what you can’t deliver. Always deliver what you have promised (i.e. engineer arrival times, status updates and call backs etc…).
  • Be Proactive – Push relevant information out, don’t expect customers to have to come and get it. Ensure the right links are in place with Operations / Engineering so that the Service Desk has the right information to manage the customer expectation.
  • Be Respectful – Train your staff to put the customer at ease and empathise with them. Develop and train good questioning techniques and good listening skills. The customer should feel that they have sought ‘service’ and not ‘help’ (customers can feel patronised if they have had to seek help)
  • Be Respected – Train your staff to manage difficult calls and callers in high pressure situations. Have the procedures in place to escalate calls up your leadership structure quickly and efficiently. Staff will be more confident dealing with difficult calls when they know they are supported by their leadership. Always follow through on any abusive behaviour towards your staff, it is never acceptable and your team will appreciate it more than anything else that you can do for them. Remember your customers are also responsible citizens within the company community.
  • Be Prepared – Have customers details pre-populated; don’t make them repeat basic information each time they call. Look at their recent call history and not just what they are telling you today. Is there a bigger picture – what is their overall relationship likely to be at the moment with IT? Can the agent positively influence that relationship? Have as much knowledge as possible at the agent’s fingertips so they can solve issues the first time.
  • Be Focused – Understand the customers business and the pressures that they may be under due to IT issues. Focus on getting them working again (i.e. work the business requirements and not just the IT) and then go fix the background issues.
  • Be Flexible – Be responsive and flexible when impact or urgency requires it. Take individual circumstances into account and do the right thing by the customer, build effective ‘Service Exception’ processes (i.e. above and beyond any SLA that may be in place) so that your supply chain can respond when you need them to.

In essence, the service desk customer wants their issue resolved / requirement fulfilled in a timely manner and without exhaustive effort on their behalf. If this isn’t immediate, they require accurate information to plan their contingency and confidence that clear ownership will now drive fulfilment. They require confidence that promises will be kept and any significant changes communicated proactively. The customer expects a professional ‘customer service experience’ in line with or better than those they experience in their dealings with commercial suppliers. They expect to be treated courteously, professionally and for their individual requirements to be recognised, with respect, flexibility and responsiveness.

By executing on the foundational elements and techniques we mapped out in the previous post, you will be able to set this customer charter as a goal for nearly every call and be able to achieve it.

A Service Desk that is designed with ‘good manners’, executed by people with an understanding of and belief in those good manners will have laid solid foundations to consistently deliver exceptional customer service.

Best, Steve

IT Service Desk: Structure and Key Elements

    Jim D

As we mentioned in our first service desk post, the service desk is the critical central point where you interact daily with your customers. To deliver outstanding IT capabilities and service, you need to ensure your service desk performs at a high level. From ITIL and other industry resources you can obtain the outlines of a properly structured service desk, but their perspective places the service desk as an actor in production processes and does not necessarily yield insight into best practices and techniques to make a world class service desk. It is worthwhile though to ensure you start with ITIL as a base of knowledge on service management and here we will provide best practices to enable you to reach greater performance.

Foremost, of course is that you understand what are the needs of the business and the levels of service required. We start with the assumption that you have outlined your business requirements, you understand the primary services and levels of performance you must achieve. With this in hand, there are 7 areas of best practice that we think are required to achieve 1st quartile or world-class performance.

Team and Location: First and foremost is the team and location. As the primary determinant to delivering outstanding service is the quality of the personnel and adequate staffing of the center, how you recruit, staff and develop your team is critical. Further, if you locate the service desk where it is difficult to attract and retain the right caliber of staff, you will struggle to be successful. The service desk must be a consolidated entity, you cannot run a successful service desk where there are multiple small units scattered around your corporate footprint. You will be unable to invest in the needed call center technology and provide the career path to attract the right staff if it is highly dispersed. It is appropriate and typically optimal, for large organization to have two or three services in different time zones to optimize coverage (time of day) and languages.

Locate your service desk where there are strong engineering universities nearby that will provide an influx of entry level staff eager to learn and develop. Given staff cost will be the primary cost factor in your service, ensure you locate in lower cost areas that have good language skills, access to the engineering universities, and appropriate time zones. For example, if you are in Europe, you should look to have one or two consolidated sites located just outside 2nd tier cities with strong universities. For example, do not locate in Paris or London, instead base your service desk either in or just outside Manchester or Budapest or Vilnius. This will enable you to tap into a lower cost yet high quality labor market that also is likely to provide more part-time workers that will help you solve peak call periods.

Knowledge Management and Training: Once you have your location and a good staff, you need to ensure you equip the staff with the tools and the knowledge to resolve issues. The key to a good service desk is to actually solve problems or provide services instead of just logging them. It is far less costly to have a service desk member be able to reset a password, correct a software configuration issue, or enable a software license than for them to log the user name and issue or request and then pass it to a second level engineering group. And it is far more satisfying for your user. So invest in excellent tools and training including:

  • Start with an easy and powerful service request system that is tied into your knowledge management system.
  • Invest in and leverage a knowledge management system that will enable your service desk staff to quickly parse potential solution paths and apply to the issue at hand.
  • Ensure that all new applications or major changes that go into production are accompanied by appropriate user and service desk documentation and training.
  • Have a training plan for your staff. Every service desk no matter how large or small should have a plan that trains agents to solve problems, use the tools and understand the business better.  We recommend a plan that enables 8 hours of training per agent per month. This continuous training keeps your organization more knowledgeable on how to solve problems and understand how incidents impact the businesses they are supporting.
  • Support external engineering training. We also recommend fully supporting external training and certification. When your service desk staff get that additional education or certification such as Windows or network certifications, your company now has a more capable service desk employee who could potentially (eventually) move into the junior engineering ranks. This migration can be both a benefit to your engineering team, and enable you to attract more qualified service desk staff because of the existence of such an upward career route.
  • Foster a positive customer service attitude and skills. Ensure your service desk team is fully trained in how to work with customers, who may arrive on the phone already frustrated. These important customer interface skills are powerful tools for them to deliver a positive experience. Give them the right attitude and vision (not just how to serve, but being a customer advocate with the rest of IT) as they are your daily connection with the customer.
  • Communicate your service desk vision and goals. This regular communication ties everything together and prevents the team from wandering in many directions.  Proper communication between operations, knowledge management, training, process and procedures ensures you focus on the right areas at the right time and it also ensures the team is always moving in the same direction, striving for the same goal of high performance at very competitive price points.

Modern infrastructure and production tools:  The service desk is not a standalone entity. It must have a clean mesh with the production, change, asset, and delivery processes and functions within IT. It is best to have a single production system serving production, change and incident leveraging a single configuration database. The service desk request toolset should also be tightly integrated with this system (and there are some newer but very strong toolsets that deliver all aspects) so that all information is both available at each interaction and the quality of the data can be maintained without multiple entries. As the service desk is really the interface between the customer and these IT processes, the cleaner and more direct the service desk mesh the better the customer experience and the engineering result. You can also use the service desk interaction with the customer to continually improve the quality of the data at hand. For example, when a customer calls in to order new software or reset a password, you can verify and update a few pieces of data such as the location of their PC or their mobile device information, etc. This enables better asset management and provides for improved future service. In addition to a well-integrated set of software tools and production processes, you should invest in a modern call center telephony capability with easy-to-use telephony menus. You should also have  internet and chat channels as well as traditional telephony to exploit automated self-service interfaces as much as possible. This is the experience that your users understand and leverage in their consumer interfaces and what they expect from you. You should measure your interfaces against a bar of ordering something from Amazon.

Establish and publish SLAs and a service catalogue: As part of the equation of providing an excellent service desk experience, you need to set the users expectations and provide an effective way to order IT services. It is important to define your services and publish SLAs for them (e.g., a new PC will be delivered in two days, or, we answer 95% of all service desk calls within 45 seconds). When you define the services, ensure that you focus on holistic services or experiences rather than component pieces. For example, ordering a new PC for a new employee should be a clear service that includes everything you would expect to get started (ids, passwords, software, setup and configuration, remote access capability, etc) not a situation where the PC got there in two days but it took the user another two months to get everything else they need subsequently discovered, ordered, and implemented. Think instead of target user result or experience. An analogy would be the McDonald’s value meal: as a consumer you do not order each individual french fry and pickle, you order a No. 3 and drink, fries, meal, etc come together in a value pack. Make sure your service catalogue has ‘value packs’ and not individual fries.

Mature leverage of metrics and feedback loops: with the elements above you will have a strong base of a service desk. To move it to outstanding performance, you must leverage the track of continuous improvement. Use the metrics gathered by your service desk processes to track where key data that is actionable:

  • Chronic issues – use Pareto analysis to determine what the biggest issues are and then leverage root cause to identify how to eliminate the issues from occurring. The solutions will range from better user training to eliminating complex system faults within your applications. But these remedies will eliminate the call (and cost) and remove ongoing problems that are sand in the gears of IT’s relationship with its customers
  • Self-Service opportunities – again, Pareto analysis will show you what volume requests you receive that if you heavily automate and move to self service, you can take significant work out of your IT shop and provide the customer with an interface they expect. This is not just password resets, it could be software downloads or the ability to access particular denied pages on the internet. Set up a lightweight workflow capability with proper management approvals to enable your users to self serve.
  • Poor Service – use customer satisfaction surveys and traditional call center metrics to ensure your staff are delivering to a high level, Use the data to identify service problem areas and address accordingly.
  • Emerging trends – Your applications, your users, and your companies needs are dynamic. Use the incident and service request data to understand what is emerging as an issue or need. For example, increasing performance complaint calls on an application that has been stable could indicate a trend of increasing business usage of a system that is on the edge of performance failure. Or increasing demand for a particular software package may indicate a need to do a standardized rollout of a tool that is used more widely than before.

Predictable IT delivery and positive cross engagement: The final element to ensuring an outstanding service desk and customer experience lies with the rest of the IT team. While the service desk can accomplish a great deal, it cannot deliver if the rest of IT does not provide solid, predictable service delivery. While that is quite obvious, you should use the service desk metrics of how well your IT team is delivering against requests to judge not just the service desk but also to identify engineering team delivery issues. Did you miss the desktop PC delivery because the service desk did not take down the right information or because the desktop implementation team missed its SLA? Further, the engineering component teams should be meeting with the service desk team (at least quarterly) to ascertain what defects they are introducing, what volume issues are arising from their areas, and how they can be resolved.  On a final note, you may find (as is often the case) that the longest delay to service delivery (e.g. that desktop PC) is obtaining either the user’s business management approval or finance approval. With data from the metrics, you should be able to justify and invest in a lightweight workflow system that obtains these approvals automatically (typical via email/intranet combination) and reduces the unproductive effort of chasing approvals by your team.

So quite a few elements of a successful service desk. Perhaps one way to summarize these elements is to view it as a sturdy three-legged stool. The seat is the service desk team.  Knowledge management and training are one leg.Processes and metrics and the telephony infrastructure and tools are the other two legs. The legs are made sturdier with effective communications and a supporting IT team.

Perhaps there are other elements or techniques that you would emphasize? Let us know we look forward to your comments. Best, Jim, Bob, and Steve.

Our Additional Authors
About Bob Barnes: Bob has over 20 years of experience managing Service Desk and Infrastructure teams.  He has experience in the financial service industry, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, telecommunication, legal and Government.  He has spoken at many industry conferences such as HDI, ICMI and Pink Elephant.  Bob has degrees in Information Systems and Business Management.
About Steve Wignall: Steve is an IT Service Management professional with significant
experience of leading large scale global IT Service Management functions in the Financial Services industry. Steve has contributed to defining the global industry standards for Service Desk quality as a former member of the Service Desk Institute Standards Committee. Steve led his Service Desk to be the first team globally to achieve the prestigious Service Desk Institute 4 Star Quality Certification, achieving an unparalleled 100% rating in all assessment categories and is a former winner of the SDI UK Service Desk Team of the Year.

 

 

 

IT Service Desk best practices

    Jim D

An important interface for your internal customers is through your IT service desk. Unfortunately, in many situations the service desk (or help desk) does not use up-to-date practices and can be a backwater of capability. This can result in a very poor reputation for IT because the service desk is the primary customer interface with the IT organization. I recall starting at a company tasked with turning around the IT organization. When I asked about the IT help desk, the customer turned to me and said ‘ You mean the IT helpless  desk?’  With a reputation that poor with our customers, I immediately set out to turnaround our service desk and supporting areas.

The IT Service Desk may seem quite straightforward to address — maybe the thought is that all you really need to do is have one number, staff it, be courteous and try hard.  This isn’t the case and there are some clear best practice techniques and approaches that will enable you to deliver consistent, positive interactions with your customers as well as enable greater productivity and lower cost for the broader IT team.

For our discussion, I have two esteemed former colleagues who have run top notch service desks that will be authoring material on best practices and how to deliver an outstanding customer experience through this critical interface. Both Steve Wignall and Bob Barnes have run world class service desks at large financial services companies. And I think you will find the guidance and techniques they provide here today and in subsequent posts to be a surefire manner to transforming your ‘helpless’ desk to a best in class service desk.

First, let’s recap why the service desk is such an important area for IT:

  • the service desk is the starting point for many key processes and services for IT
  • well-constructed, the service desk can handle much of the routine work of IT, enabling engineering and other teams to do higher value work
  • it is your primary interface with the customer, where you can gauge the pulse of your users, and make the biggest daily impact on your reputation
  • with the right data and tools, the service desk identify and correct problem outbreaks early, thereby reducing customer impacts and lowering overall support costs.

And yet, despite its importance to IT, too often Service Desks are chronic under-performers due to the following issues:

  • poor processes or widespread lack of adherence to them
  • the absence, or low quality application, of a scientific and metric based management approach
  • lousy handoffs and poor delivery by the rest of IT
  • inadequate resources and recruiting, worsened by weak staff development and team-building
  • weak sponsorship by senior IT leaders
  • ineffective service desk leadership

Before we get into the detailed posts on service desk best practices, here are a few items to identify where your team is, and a few things to get started on:

1. What is your first call resolution rate? If it is below 70% then there is work to do. If it is above 70% but primarily because of password reset, then put in decent self serve password reset and re-evaluate.

2. What is the experience of your customers? Are you doing a monthly or quarterly survey to track satisfaction with the service? If not, get going and implement. I recommend a 7 point scale and hold yourself to the same customer satisfaction bar your company is driving for with its external customers.

3. What are the primary drivers of calls? Are they systems issues? Are they due to user training or system complexity issues? Workstation problems? Are calls being made to report a surplus of availability or general systems performance issues? If you know clearly (e.g., via Pareto analysis) what is driving your calls, then we have the metrics in place (if not, get the metrics – and process if necessary — in place). Once you have the metrics you can begin to sort out the causes and tackle them in turn. What is your team doing with the metrics? Are they being used to identify the cause of calls to then go about eliminating the call in the first place?

For example, if leading drivers of calls are training and complexity, is your team reworking the system so it is more intuitive or improving the training material? If the drivers are workstation issues, do you know what component and what model and are now figuring out what proactive repair or replacement program will reduce these calls? Remember, each call you eliminate probably saves your company at least $40 (mostly in eliminating the downtime of the caller).

4. Do you and your senior staff meet with the service desk team regularly and review their performance and metrics? Do senior IT leaders sponsor major efforts to eliminate the source of calls? Does the service desk feature in your report to customers?

5. If it is a third party provider, have you visited their site lately? Does your service area have the look and feel and knowledge of your company so they can convey your brand? And hold them to the same high performance bar as you would your own team.

Use these five items for a quick triage of your service desk and our next posts will cover the best practices and techniques to build a world-class service desk. Later this week, Bob and Steve will cover the structure and key elements of a world-class service desk and how to go about transforming your current desk or building a great one from scratch. Steve will also cover the customer charter and its importance to maintaining strong performance and meeting expectations.

I look forward to your thoughts and experiences in this area. And perhaps you have a service desk that could use some help to turn around IT’s and your reputation.

Best, Jim