Tag: 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: 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