Service Autonomy

Even most of generation X (those of between the age of 41 and 55) would wholly agree that service autonomy to the customer is a wonderful thing. Why sit on the phone to your insurance company to change your address if you can just do it online via a customer portal? Why call to chase a query if you can get updates online?

Giving autonomy to your customer is crucial if you want to optimise your service desk team.

Automation, automation, automation

It’s very easy to discuss and understand the importance and power of automating mundane IT tasks and updates across your customer base with different OS versions and forever evolving estates. However, it is difficult to achieve and sustain without significant investment.

Outsourcing the automation of your Network Operations Centre or Service Desk might be an obvious point for us to make but there is a reason why thousands of organisations choose that path. It allows you to re-focus internal resource on strategy, third line support and improving your service desk experience.

Reporting – on everything

One of those strategic tasks your service desk team can do is to focus time on reporting implementing change within the service desk department.

Finally, to grow better you need to know what’s working and what’s not. Optimise your help desk by implementing reports that give you insights into your current state of affairs.

Answers to the following questions may result in the realisation that your service department needs additional resource or outsourcing support. Maybe you need to rearrange how your team operates.

• How many tickets are you averaging per day? Per week?
• What’s the average time to respond to a ticket?
• What is the source of most of your tickets?
• How does ticket volume differ month over month?
• What happened that month that caused a spike in tickets and how can we avoid that in the future?

Customer Engagement

One of the core pillars of the Service Desk is in the name itself, it is a system for delivering service to your customers or users.

It is important to ensure your customers are engaged with the service request process, to ensure they know where to go and understand that circumventing the process is not in their interests.

Education to customers goes far beyond giving them an email address and a phone number. Illustrative examples of how to log certain types of problems and an easy to follow flow chart for escalation or types of problems would add value to your customer’s experience.

Keep your team SMART

Managers can enact the SMART methodology to bring structure in assisting agents in setting goals and objectives. The S.M.A.R.T. acronym is explained as follows:

• Specific — A goal needs to be clear and easily understood. “Decrease first response times by 5 percent by June 30” is clear and specific.
• Measurable — A goal must be measurable by agents, so they can track their own progress toward success.
• Attainable — A goal should not ask for more than is reasonably possible to achieve, otherwise it will demotivate agents and may cause them to ask “Why bother trying? It can’t be done.”
• Relevant — Agents should understand why the goal has been established by seeing its relevance to their day to day efforts. Using the example above, “Decrease first response times by 5 percent by June 30,” management can establish rewards for agents who achieve that goal.
• Timely — Goals must have deadlines, otherwise it’s impossible to measure success.

Service Desk is a necessary part of any MSP; optimising your service desk with automation and reporting, however, is what can make your department stand out. Optimising your service desk will save you time, energy, and resources so that you can focus on what matters most: delighting your customers.

Speak to Inbay about how we can lighten the burden of your service desk load to give you time to delight your customers.