Most folks have heard the story of the super keen service desk analyst that received a call from a panicked assistant, who spilled some coffee on her boss’s keyboard. The service desk analyst quickly figured that the cost of a keyboard replacement would be minimal, and that the situation would be best remedied by first calming down the assistant. So, the service desk analyst told the assistant to unplug the keyboard, wash it under a running tap, and then let it dry before plugging it back in. There would be plenty of time for the service desk analyst to send over a replacement keyboard while the assistant was performing these tasks. That afternoon, a furious service desk manager was looking for the idiot that told an assistant to run water over a $3000 laptop!

While this story is funny at first blush; at a deeper core level, it also highlights the absolute importance of the service desk team members asking the right questions. Reasons abound to support the importance of asking the right questions. Let us examine some of the most popular reasons and theories.

First, a major issue shared by most service desks is the overwhelmingly high volume of calls, which usually results in longer wait times for customers. Wait time is the number one complaint that customers have about the service desk, and anything that can speed up this process will undoubtedly increase customer satisfaction. Thus, it is extremely important that when a customer does speak with a service desk team member, that the team member can quickly diagnose the problem and get the proper technician or department involved. The ultimate effectiveness of this series of actions is foremost dependent upon “correctly understanding the problem.”

Therefore, regardless of how frantic or chatty a customer may be in explaining the problem, the service desk analyst must ensure that he or she has systematically asked the standardized questions designed to diagnose the problem and then guides the customer towards the correct solution. Moreover, diagnosing the problem correctly the first time will speed up wait time significantly because an incident ticket will not be sent to the wrong assignment group—thus eliminating the customer’s need to waste time waiting in the wrong group’s queue or to repeat his or her stories to a new support engineer.

Furthermore, collecting data metrics on your products is an intricate part of any business model. Data collection regarding service support normally comes from two areas: 1) the service desk and 2) the service provider.

Using Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) software, the service desk logs an incident under a certain category when the call comes in, and the service provider engineer will log the problem under the appropriate resolution category when the incident is resolved. Thus, managers can review and decide where they need to spend money on resolving product issues, either by patches or upgrades. If your service desk is misdiagnosing the incidents, or not quite fully understanding the incidents and miscategorizing them; as a result, the manager will not receive the accurate and precise metrics that they require. Thus, the whole company becomes affected for many change releases because the proper resources were not working on the right problems. This whole process begins with your service desk team members asking the right questions and ensuring that they completely understand the problems being explained by the customers.

Finally, one of the main objectives of your service desk is to instill customer confidence. When a good service desk member quickly guides a customer through explaining his or her problems, and then either resolves the incident or connects the customer to the correct service provider for resolution, the customer gains great confidence in both the product, and, by extension, the company. However, as a manager, you do not want customer confidence to be exclusively dependent on the temperament of your service desk team members. While you may have a fantastic service desk team, every member has bad days, and every team member makes mistakes. Thus, it is extremely important that the service desk manager has good service desk practices that ensure the proper and standardized questions will be asked up front—every single time; and that each and every problem will get answered and resolved in a timely manner. Moreover, the incident will be logged under the proper category; and if it is a reoccurring problem, it will be addressed in the form of future patches and versions.

In sum, the first contact with the customer is important because it affects the entire service desk process. Additionally, it is equally important for service desk managers to ensure that their service desk team members are asking the right questions. Many service desk managers often overlook and underestimate this aspect of the service desk. If you already have a good bank of clear and concise questions, make sure you continually review and test these questions to validate that they are still the right ones. Otherwise, the whole company will eventually be affected.

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While this is a good definition for someone who understands the vernacular of ITIL, it isn’t easily understood by the layman. Let’s dissect the definition and put it into terms the general population can understand. The IT Service provider is the organization that has been hired by the Customer to perform a service, for example, answer calls. The service level agreement is the document, which can be a few brief lines or it can be a hundreds of pages, which describes each service level target(s). These service targets are based on the customers business needs. For example, if Large Corp. sells their products worldwide, they may have a need to have a call center that is available 24×7. This one business objective, call center available 24×7, could produce multiple service level targets such as:

Call Center is available to take calls 99.99% of the time each month.

No more than 5% of calls will abandon each month.

99% of all incoming calls must be answered within 30 seconds.

All of the service level targets must be agreed upon by both parties. Once both parties agree to all of the service level targets, they are assembled into the Service Level Agreement document. The service level targets will each have a description that identifies the expectation, how it will be measured and penalties, if missed. For example:

Call center must answer all incoming calls within 30 seconds

Measurement period: 1 month

Report(s): ASA Report 101 – monthly

Penalty: $10,000

The SLA is a joint goal between the IT Service Provider and the Customer. Although penalties do reduce costs and they do send a strong signal to service providers to improve their service, neither you nor the service provider “win” if an SLA is missed. Think of an SLA as a shared goal.

It should be noted that the term Service Level Agreement is used in many companies when discussing agreements between two internal groups, such as the Procurement Department will process all purchase requests by the Engineering Department within 5 business days. Technically, per ITIL, this is not a Service Level Agreement, but instead an Operational Level Agreement.

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Webster’s dictionary defines the word, “expectation” as the act or state of looking forward or anticipating the degree of probability that something will occur. How does this relate to the ITIL standards? Not setting proper expectations with the customer can result in dialogs such as:

CUSTOMER: I submitted a ticket to have someone map a new printer to my laptop, but nobody has come by or called me back.

HELP DESK: I am sorry to hear that but we are busy with a network outage, it may be awhile before somebody comes by to assist you in your request.

CUSTOMER: Can you give me some timeframe on when to expect a visit from a technician?

HELP DESK: It all depends on when we get the network outage repaired; it could be then next 5 minutes or the next 5 days.

CUSTOMER: It is no wonder your area is referred to as the helpless desk. CLICK!

Unfortunately, the above conversation is all too familiar in many help desks across the world because expectations are never set with customer. One way of setting expectations with the customer, even before they call or write, is to establish Service Level Objectives, such as:

Ultimately, service level objectives will benefit the help desk in a number of ways such as: Less repeat callers/tickets – with service level objectives established, customers are less likely to repeatedly call in order to get a status of their issue.Less upset customers – if the objectives are “advertised” on websites and IVR/VRU’s, the customers are less likely to be irate when calling a help desk if they already know that their issue may not be resolved on first contact and may be considered a low priority.Potentially reduces staffing – less repeat calls and tickets to the help desk, lowers call and ticket volume, and potentially reduces the staff needed to perform the volume of work.Assists in priority setting for employees – with objectives in place, the help desk staff have a clear understanding of what issues should take precedent (i.e., individual outage should be worked prior to a individual new request).If your help desk has not established service level objectives, your next step should be to have a project approved to begin establishing the objectives to help you manage your customers.

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