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Objective of the Service Desk:
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The role and responsibilities of the Service Desk are dependent on the nature of the organisation's business and of the support infrastructure in place. For most organisations, a primary role is the recording and life-cycle management of all Incidents that affect the operational service delivered to the business and its Customers.
Incidents that cannot be solved quickly by the Service Desk should be passed to second-line or third- party support teams for diagnosis and resolution. If they remain unresolved beyond their SLA target, they may get referred to Problem Management. During this process, the Service Desk's role is to keep the Customer informed of progress or advise them of any Work-around that may allow them to continue working.
As a single point of contact, it is important that the Service Desk provides the Customer with, at a minimum, a status update on service availability and any request being managed by the service team, including the Incident number for use in future communication. Status update information might include:
The common Service Desk functions include:
Every Incident and question (Change requests should also be considered) reported by the Customer, its history and the solution given should be registered, whether it took one minute or one month to fix. The actual elapsed time is not a measure of its importance or business impact. For example:
Every contact with the Customer provides an invaluable metric to assist in the understanding of Customer requirements.
It is important that the Service Desk is empowered to enforce agreed Customer service levels with second-line support and third-party suppliers. It is essential also that second-line support operations are clear on any agreed service levels (SLA/OLA) that they are required to support.
For the second-line support managers, it is not always practical for staff to 'drop' other work to support the Service Desk because they themselves may be on project deadlines. In these situations it is recommended that the second-line support team members, for whichever service is required, rotate support to the Service Desk. Even if the team consists of two members, it means that while one is supporting the Service Desk, the other can focus, uninterrupted, on project-based work.
With this method in place the Service Desk can provide second-line support managers with staff resource use figures to assist in overall staffing requirements, and clearly identify what is being done.
In many cases, organisations attempt to have Customers' telephone calls picked up within a specific number of rings (e.g. 3-10). The decision you make on the value set is dependent on the resources that you have available. However, the expected pick-up time should be clearly communicated to Customers and Users. The provision of self-help technologies and electronic Customer registration will greatly assist in freeing up telephone lines and resources to handle critical Incidents.
However, this contact point is a key influence on the Customer's perception of your service. Therefore getting the correct balance is critical to managing Customer satisfaction.
The time spent handling a Customer Incident on the telephone is dependent on available resources and their skill levels. Careful judgement is required to determine when to pass the Incident to second-line support or transfer it to another area in the support department. It is essential that the main support number(s) are kept available as much as possible, especially in the case of a major service failure when other Customers will be calling in.
Unless you have an advanced telephone system that informs you of queued calls, setting a staff 'talk time' maximum is advisable (e.g., 1-2 minutes) to ensure that all Customer Incidents are handled promptly and confidence is not lost.
In an ideal world, SLAs define the business need. However, when a Customer calls with a serious problem, they are only concerned with resolving the issue as quickly as possible. The Customer may be under pressure to get an important quotation out or may themselves have a Customer waiting. At this point, discretion and understanding is required. It is important that each Customer's individual situation is assessed and addressed, as this will ultimately define the Customer perception of your service.
If a Customer demands an action beyond the control of the Service Desk, the Service Desk staff should politely refer them to the duty Service Manager.
Even in the best-supported operations, services breaches will occur: another Incident requires urgent attention, staff are off sick, spare parts are not available, you are unable to diagnose the problem. What is then important is to successfully manage the service breach, by escalation to the Problem Management team, where appropriate.
It is also acceptable to have an 'agreed service breach' where the Customer has been informed of the probability of the breach and has agreed that this situation is acceptable. Key points to managing an agreed service breach are:
It is often the case that a service breach occurs because the Customer is unavailable to get further information about a known Incident, or because the Customer's location is not accessible.
In this case it is necessary to document clearly that work could not progress because of this situation and how much SLA elapsed time was lost.
Recording service breach details is critical to understanding whether or not existing SLAs are practical. If an IT operation keeps breaching them or equally, consistently over achieves its targets, clearly the SLAs need to be reviewed and the area(s) causing the variation need to be identified.
It is equally essential to report on agreed and Customer-initiated service breaches. From a business perspective, the SLA has either been achieved or it has not.
Defining full-time staffing levels is very difficult without a definitive way to predict the demand for service. The number of staff employed on the Service Desk is dependent on the needs of the business and is based on a range of important criteria, including:
All these items should be carefully considered before making any decision on staffing levels. This should also be reflected in the levels of documentation required. Remember that the better the service, the more the business will use it.
Traditionally, first-line Customer interaction functions have a high staff turnover. This should be taken into account when reviewing the required resources and the training requirement to get staff up to speed and productive.
To keep deal with some of these staffing constraints, in some organisations it is common to use 'expert' Customers to deal with first-line support Problems and queries (commonly known as Super or Expert Users). This is typically in specific application areas, or geographical locations, where there is insufficient justification for full-time support staff. In this case, the User can be a valuable resource if use is properly coordinated, with:
With all requests entered into the main Service Desk tool, valuable usage details can be provided to the local management to ensure that resource is focused in the correct areas and not misused.
From the above considerations, it is clear that a careful study of the workload mix is necessary to define the required staff levels, skill types and the associated costs. Such an analysis should include:
Aligning Customer perception and satisfaction is paramount to the success of any support operation. It is the Customers' perception that, in the end, defines whether the Service Desk is meeting their needs,rather than availability statistics or transaction rates. Satisfaction surveys are an excellent method of monitoring Customer perception and expectation and can be used a powerful marketing tool. However several key points should be addressed to ensure success:
How often surveys are taken is a business decision, based on the rate of change within your organisation and other business drivers. To monitor satisfaction on a daily basis at source, your request closure process should be used for a detailed Customer satisfaction response on specific applications, Customers or services. To improve the speed of data capture and reduce the resource needed to analyse survey data, the usage of electronic based surveys should be considered.
It is important to define clearly the target audience for any surveys and the scope of the questions. For example, the questions you would ask of an accounts clerk in relation to the stability of the service provided would be different from those you would ask of an accounts director. From the clerk's perspective, their printer was unavailable 'several' times during the month, whereas the accounts director was only concerned that, at month end, he or she was unable to produce customer bills on time, which resulted in a financial loss.
For smaller support operations, the need for full-time support is often unclear. However, the need for a central point of contact for Customers is still essential. Methods for providing this central focus include:
It is often left up to the front-line, operational support staff to provide the Service Desk resource, with development and other such groups not being involved.
The involvement of second-line staff in the Service Desk is recommended, either on a full time or a rotational basis. These are generally the groups who provide operational documentation, introduce change, and provide training on new systems. Participating in the Service Desk is an excellent way for second-line staff to:
Second-line staff participation in the Service Desk is the first step to providing a truly business- focused service team. In particular, this approach is strongly recommended when a new service is going live, as the first weeks of implementation can be the most traumatic.
It is also recommended that Service Desk staff be given the opportunity to spend time working directly with Customers. The end in mind here is to ensure a better understanding of Customer requirements. Further, reciprocal arrangements where Service Desk staff work, on a seconded basis, with developers, support teams and project teams can also yield significant benefits.
From careful monitoring of the workload (as described in paragraph 4.4.7), Customer, User and support-staff training needs can be identified. By addressing Customer and User training needs effectively, call volumes and requests for assistance will be reduced, and both Users and support staff will be more productive.
Organisations may use 'call rate reduction' as a direct business benefit of introducing a Service Desk. However although call rates may drop initially upon the introduction of a Service Desk because of the improved service, they will typically start to rise again thereafter. This effect is due to improved Customer confidence, and will result in Customers using the Service Desk, not only for reporting Incidents, but also for advice and guidance and other support activities. This cycle should be carefully and continually monitored.
When referring to Customer support workloads, many support departments define their performance based on very objective and simple statistics, such as:
However, best practice qualitative measures for a Service Desk in any given period include:
In a Service Management framework these request types are specifically defined and managed as individual processes.
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