Forrester, the research company, produced an excellent white paper last June that nicely covered 31 best practices for the Service Desk.
I wanted to highlight just a few of the 31 best practices here and so I have picked a few key headings and then provided some of my own thoughts on each one.
The most important and relevant, in my opinion, are:-
Hire the right people - your service quality is directly linked to the aptitude and attitude of your people. Hiring the right people, with the right attitude, is the most important decision that a company makes when moving towards world class service delivery. Invest the right time in creating excellent hiring, recruitment and development practices.
Train Your Business Users - it's amazing the reduction in incoming service request calls and incidents - when you train your business users correctly. Think about creating an IT or Service Orientation programme for your users. In my own experience, at a major client in 2004, we delivered a rolling programme of end-user "essentials" education for new business users - it worked a treat. Never under-estimate how simple things make a world of difference. One lady we came across was an exert in her field, however had NEVER used a mouse before. We had to help her at first when she ran out of elbow space trying to make the pointer on screen move along the the far right of the screen. Her hand fell off the edge of the desk!! Silly example, but relevant.
Train Your Service Desk Staff - Introduce a structured Orientation programme for all new Service Desk people. Get everyone aligned in terms of their IT, system and Service knowledge. Introduce special 'skills checks' to test their practical knowledge and understanding of resolving the "top 10" incoming incidents. Launch a 'side by side' listening programme for IT managers to sit alongside the service desk team (say for an hour an month) to actively listen in on calls and offer advice and support. Not only will the service desk prove their worth to those IT managers (say, the Desktop manager) but they will receive helpful advice and support in their quest to eliminate incoming calls.
Create a culture of Innovation - Instill the culture of continuous improvement. Empower the service desk to do more than repeatedly process the same type of incoming calls again and again. Get them to ask themselves "WHY" is this happening repeatedly. Then, get them some quality time OFF the phones to actually do some investigating and propose a solution. Oftentimes, the answer is simple, low cost and easy to implement. Give it a try!
Set User Expectations - Really important to continue to set expectations. Users will tell you straight away if they are unhappy rather than at the point of late delivery - or when they callback in to complain. Remember, most business users sit alongside 4 others - and will happily complain about how the face of IT/Technology (the Service Desk) is not performing. Perception is reality on the end of a phone.
Know thy Customers - Empower the Service Desk team to spend quality time away from their phones once a month sitting side by side with business users to learn HOW they use their applications and understand the pressures that business folks are actually under. This helps build pockets of new relationships. The Service Desk folks have buddy's they can call on from time to time to discuss specific challenges. The user community will also appreciate the time taken to understand their local operating needs. In one client I worked in - we trialled this for a month. One situation led to the trial becoming an ongoing programme. This was when a bright young Service Desk Analyst recognized that the reason why the departments print-outs were always late was that the paper the printer used automatically deferred to a different tray that was broken. A quick fix and an hour later - the tray was repaired - and the bottleneck disappeared. this saved 4 calls a day. Doesn't sound much expect that this had been going on for 2 years!
Conduct satisfaction surveys - at a management level, surveys can be very effective. You can learn so much about how the service you are providing is making a difference or not. You can also baseline your performance and set about ways of improving it. the business managers really appreciate the time you take to talk to them and the focus you have on making things better. Credibility is built in the process.
Invest the right amount on ITIL - too little, too late - OR - too much too soon? The answer's in the middle - somewhere. Find that 'sweetspot' where the right level of process, education, tooling and ITIL adoption makes perfect sense. You can always evolve things later.
Use remote control software - this was a positive revelation in one organization I worked in late 2000. The end user community were SO impressed! Each of the Service Desk folks were well educated on resolving the 'top 10' incoming incidents and service requests but in a style that also educated the end-users. This led to a dramatic reduction in incoming calls over a few weeks - freeing the desk up to spend more quality time learning, understanding and resolving the more difficult incidents. This, in turn, took pressure of new calls away from the level 2 support people, lowering the cost of resolution in the process.
In the final analysis, hiring right, developing people, supporting people and providing them with positive opportunities to make a real difference - is the way to enhancing service quality on the Service Desk.
Why not issue it to your Service Desk, asking them to prioritise and/or brainstorm around the ideas raised - and then come up with their own set of improvement activities?
"You need to make the time - to make the difference".
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