Lamborghini. Ferrari. Porsche. BMW. Jaguar. Mercedes. These companies use cutting edge engineering and materials to make some of the fastest, most agile sports cars in the world. But none of that matters if someone doesn’t tighten the lug nuts on one of the tires.
Welcome to your service desk. You can have the best IT system in the world, but if the service desk doesn’t run right then the wheels come right off.
The first step to making sure that doesn’t happen to you is familiarizing yourself with the challenges that your service desk will face. Here are the six top problems to prep for:
1. So Many Different Devices: BYOD means a huge number of different types of hardware, operating systems, and apps in an overwhelming number of different configurations.
2. Growing Ticket Volume: More people using non-standardized devices means many more problems to solve. And if the huge increase in volume isn’t enough of a problem, the additional needs of end-to-end activity tracking and workflow management make those tickets even more of a chore.
3. Growing Ticket Complexity: The ticket tsunami makes it harder to track the dependencies between tickets, ticket severity, response time, effectiveness of ticket handling, and communication between the end-user and the technician.
4. Adding the Right Staff: As if it wasn’t hard enough to find staff with the particular technical skills to handle all the BYOD chaos, they also need to have the right people skills as well. And you get to do this at a time when demand for IT workers at an all-time high.
5. Improving Metrics: Measuring response times and first time fix rates are just the beginning. To truly understand how well a service desk is operating you should also measure:
- Cost per call
- Calls per agent per day
- Hold time
- First contact resolution
- Customer satisfaction
- Number of calls/issues fixed vs. number received
6. Better Communication: As a caller, there’s nothing more aggravating than having a service desk technician insist on following a particular troubleshooting script that seems to have nothing to do with the problem at hand or that you have gone through before with another technician. Even if the problem is resolved the caller goes away feeling like some of their time has been wasted. Having technicians communicate with users better by explaining why they are doing what they are doing can make a huge difference in customer satisfaction.
If all this seems like a lot to take on that’s because it is. Doing more with the less has been a fact of life for so long that being asked to do more with the same is considered a big victory. However, you don’t have to go it alone.
Connection delivers service desk on-shore/off-shore/hybrid models with methods based on ITIL principles. We can help with everything from modernizing service delivery methodology, policy, procedures, and SLAs to mapping the transformation of the desk into a SPOC support model. We’ll even check the lug nuts. For more information on what Connection can offer, complete this information request form.
