4.8 Service Desk processes and procedures

4.8.1 Considerations

When designing your processes and procedures, and taking the broad view, you will need to:

• review their validity on a regular basis, and update as required
• involve all relevant parties
• allocate sufficient time and resources
• consider alternatives (e.g. information being computerised rather than in printed form)
• provide new reference materials based on Incident and Problem trend analyses.

More detailed points are discussed in the remainder of this section.

4.8.2 Common structured interrogation technique

Providing a common structured dialogue to managing Customer requests is essential, no matter who in the support organisation responds to the Customer. The order in which questions and responses are required helps both the Customer and the support person to ensure nothing is forgotten. Using a common technique presents a professional and well-structured organisation to the Customer.

It is important to apply a common structured interrogation technique to establish and maintain:

• Customer 'pickup', i.e. response times
• contact identification (e.g. name, company, telephone)
• contact detail confirmation
• Customer response dialogue (e.g. Good morning, ACME Service Desk, Barry speaking. How can I help you?'), but done in a way that is as User-friendly as possible and not sound as if it is being read from a script.

4.8.3 Customer details and identification

Correct and unique Customer identification is essential to ensure that Customer details, existing requests and management information are uniquely and easily selectable.

The more we know about our Customers and Users, the better we can support them.

Example contact identification types include:

• name (e.g. SMITH_W)
• account code
• equipment/computer identity
• email/Internet identifier
• telephone number/extension
• personnel number
• location
• associated notes.

It should be possible to identify a Customer from one or two pieces of identification information and retrieve the rest of the information from the stored Customer database.

Providing a Customer-preferred greeting is important when corresponding with a Customer, whether orally or in writing. Many Customers and Users like to be referred to in a specific manner (e.g. Mr, Dr, Ms, Bill), and so your support systems should be designed to provide this. After all, 'Dear Mrs. Smith' or 'Dear Jill' is much more preferable to 'Dear P123232' or 'Dear SMITH_J'.

The more criteria a Customer can be selected on the better. It may be that the Customer has forgotten their account code, but your support systems should be able to isolate Customer by other user-friendly means. Possible criteria include:

• Customer ID
• name
• department
• telephone
• post code
• address/location.

4.8.4 Maintaining the Customer database

Maintaining a single source of Customer and supplier details is a major issue for many organisations, because there are generally several sources:

• personnel department (e.g. name, department, NI number)
• IT department (e.g. computer id, email address, location)
• telephone switchboard (e.g. telephone no, fax no).

A process should be defined for maintaining Customer, support staff and supplier details that answers such questions as:

• what needs to be stored?
• what are the sources, and where are they?
• how do we consolidate them?
• how do we keep them up to date?
• who maintains the master source?

4.8.5 Marketing the Service Desk amongst Customers

Raising the profile of your support services, especially the Service Desk is critical to success. The Service Desk needs to attain its own identify in order to instil confidence and strengthen the Customer relationship. This can be done using the following techniques:

• invite Customers to visit your computer training and support facilities
• use advertising materials (e.g. mouse mats, screen savers, help cards, a bulletin board)
• provide service awareness seminars and workshops
• develop your own stationery and letterheads (if permitted by the organisation)
• get involved in company activities (hockey team etc).

Knowledge and procedures review

It is important that all reference materials and procedures used by Customers, Users and support staff are well maintained, kept up-to-date and regularly reviewed, including:

• standard checklists
• training manuals
• lists of Known Errors and solutions
• product and application documentation
• hardware documentation
• knowledge bases
• support specialists skill set
• command procedures, scripts and programs
• the Customer/Supplier database(s).