Author: 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: 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