Extreme Service Manager » Service Desk http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm Staying Ahead of the Curve with SmallCart Systems Thu, 27 May 2010 07:57:04 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 The Importance of Career Certification in the Service Desk http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/service-desk/the-importance-of-career-certification-in-the-service-desk/ http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/service-desk/the-importance-of-career-certification-in-the-service-desk/#comments Thu, 27 May 2010 07:57:04 +0000 david-cook http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/?p=196 The first and most immediate interaction between your company and your customers will come at the service desk. In many organizations these positions are considered entry-level positions. While this may be true, given the importance of that first impression, it would be extremely valuable for your organization to consider a certification program for you helpdesk employees.

There are a number of routes organizations can take to getting their helpdesk employees certified. You should first and foremost research into what helpdesk certification actually is and means. In most cases, companies that provide helpdesk certification offer courses in Helpdesk Etiquette, technical etiquette, computer skills required for helpdesk operators, helpdesk terminology and best helpdesk practices. Or, some version of that skill-set. What is essential is that they also offer an exam that verifies the certification information learned and also adds some credibility to the entire process.

An avenue that I have consulted business in pursuing is a helpdesk certification train-the-trainer program. By that, I mean that your business choose your senior (or who will be your senior) helpdesk personnel to take part in a formal helpdesk certification course. They then come back and develop a helpdesk training program for the entire organization based on what they took part in and learned. What this gives you is an extremely cost effective helpdesk training program that is also tailored to meet the requirements of your organization. Also, having your own personnel develop and deliver the training re-enforces the material. In the end, this will develop very senior and knowledgeable helpdesk staff.

The benefit of having a helpdesk that is certified is many. First and foremost, you will have personnel that completely understand the helpdesk concept and how it should work and support the company. They will be shy to let you know when the company is straying away from the helpdesk mission, or if they don’t think the current structure is supporting that mission. Obliviously, having personnel certified ensures that they are qualified for the job they are doing and are thus, more confident in the job they are doing. Moreover, they will know what skill-sets it is that makes them better helpdesk professionals and, as a result, become aware of the need to constantly improve their active listening and problem solving skills.

You will see that the negotiating skills of you helpdesk staff drastically improve and you will have less and less high stress calls. Your customer – helpdesk interaction will become a more positive experience. Your customers will feel that they are interacting with a real professional that is focused on quickly and efficiently solving their particular problem. Thus, you will have folks that are not only experts in a certain technical aspect of the company but are also experts in being a proficient and valuable helpdesk specialist.

]]> http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/service-desk/the-importance-of-career-certification-in-the-service-desk/feed/ 0 Building Helpdesk Team Unity http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/service-desk/building-helpdesk-team-unity/ http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/service-desk/building-helpdesk-team-unity/#comments Sat, 22 May 2010 07:48:44 +0000 david-cook http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/?p=194 The helpdesk is the face of your company to your customer. You require a dedicated and talented staff to deliver critical services that will define your company to the customer. Typically, these folks are educated and have great problem solving skills. They want to break into the IT technical field and typically the helpdesk job is the entry level position for those new IT techs.

Thus, you end up with a number of folks, in your helpdesk, that are looking towards their next job and not the actual job they are doing now. How do you keep them motivated? How do you keep it fun? How do you keep helpdesk personnel happy to be helpdesk personnel?

The answer is to be a great leader that values the helpdesk position and truly makes it a job that is the entry level for the next great IT technicians you will have in your company.

You should be offering or cycling your helpdesk personnel through apprentice tech positions on a weekly basis. I.E. A helpdesk person would work every 3 weeks on the helpdesk and one week in an apprentice tech position. The tech position requires some thought and ideally should be part of bigger program that is structured and leading towards certification within the company as a technician.

Of course the problem comes in that you do not have an endless amount of technician positions. However, folks should understand that they are number 1 for the next position available or number 2, etc. In the meantime, as you become more and more certified within the companies program it should result in higher pay. Good, qualified, motivated helpdesk personnel are invaluable and the modestly higher wage will be extremely valuable to the company in the long run.

Another, great way to build team unity with the helpdesk is making it a fun place to work. Not an out of control place to work, but a fun place. Some easy to implement ways to make that happen is encouraging holiday themes for the workplace, recognizing birthdays with pizza and cake, develop a recognition program that rewards exceptional service to the customer, organize a Crazy Friday for the last day of month where employees dress up or down and party food is served, or, have one day a month that the manager servers lunch to everybody.

Whatever you decide to do, use the philosophy that the helpdesk are your frontline soldiers. Great generals visit their frontline troops a lot, they give them great accolades and they promote those frontline troops to higher positions because they understand the battle space. You expect great things from your frontline troops so treat them as your companies greatest asset. Your helpdesk and your company will be prosper and grow beyond your expectations.

]]> http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/service-desk/building-helpdesk-team-unity/feed/ 0 How to calculate Call Response Time and setting customer expectations http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/service-desk/how-to-calculate-call-response-time-and-setting-customer-expectations/ http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/service-desk/how-to-calculate-call-response-time-and-setting-customer-expectations/#comments Sat, 17 Apr 2010 07:42:36 +0000 david-cook http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/?p=192 Whether your helpdesk services external customers or internal employees you need to make sure that you have a clear Service Delivery policy that is plainly written and easily accessible to all who have a reason to use your helpdesk.

You may ask what a Service Delivery policy is? Well, it is a clearly defined document that outlines your helpdesk availability and your helpdesk service level priority description. That coupled with a great customer relationship management (CRM) tool will allow you to clearly calculate, define and re-calculate your helpdesk call response times and, more importantly, set clear customer expectations regarding response time.

Let’s first look at service availability. Service availability should clearly outline the hours of operation for your helpdesk and, if anything other then 24/7, the exact times for different regional locations. This should be large and clear, the customer should see this first and foremost and it should be available online, in product documentation, in workplace memorandum and/or via a recording in phone “welcome” message.

The service level priority description breaks down responsive actions by priority. These priorities can be: critical, high, medium, low, none or 1, 2 ,3 ,4 , 5. Then for each priority you would correlate a response time and a resolution time to each priority.

With this type of detailed matrix you can then give customers feedback that their problem is designated- “A level 1 priority and the expected resolution to their problem within 2-4 hrs.” Thus, the customer having seen this breakdown before contacting the help or service desk (because you have made this information available as per the instructions for the service availability information) now has a confirmation to what he expected would be a reasonable resolution time.

Priority Priority Response Level
Critical 1 Response Time: 1 business hr

Resolution Time:

  • 70% within 2 business hrs
  • 95% within 4 business hrs
High 2 Response Time: 4 business hr

Resolution Time:

  • 70% within 1 business days
  • 95% within 2 business days

Now having outlined clear service response and resolution timeframes you can use the metrics that you capture with your CRM tool (many, many excellent tools are available) to track the following must-know metrics:

  • Average time waiting for phone calls to when helpdesk answers
  • Percentage of calls solved first time
  • Percentage of incidents or service request breaching resolution time targets
  • Customer satisfaction

With these metrics you can track whether you are meeting your response time goals and re-define those resolution time response and resolution times as required for your helpdesk, identify where you require more staff or identify choke points in your helpdesk.

]]> http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/service-desk/how-to-calculate-call-response-time-and-setting-customer-expectations/feed/ 0 To quickly understand the problem: Ask the right questions http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/service-desk/to-quickly-understand-the-problem-ask-the-right-questions/ http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/service-desk/to-quickly-understand-the-problem-ask-the-right-questions/#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:35:35 +0000 david-cook http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/?p=182 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.

]]> http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/service-desk/to-quickly-understand-the-problem-ask-the-right-questions/feed/ 0 Improve Your IT Organization http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/it-strategy/improve-your-it-organization/ http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/it-strategy/improve-your-it-organization/#comments Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:38:52 +0000 Meg Chiang http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/?p=86 In July 2009, David Williams and Debra Curtis co-authored Magic Quadrant for IT Event Correlation and Analysis for Gartner.  As its name suggests, this report explains to IT organizations how to select the best ECA (Event Correlation and Analysis) product for their respective organizations.  Not only does first page showcase the Magic Quadrant, as a quick and nifty visual representation of where each of the twenty (20) vendors evaluated belongs: Challengers, Leaders, Niche Players, or Visionaries; but the report also specifies the strengths and weaknesses of each vendor company and its respective product(s). 
 
Gartner evaluated vendors—ranging from industry giants like Microsoft, IBM, and HP to lesser known companies like Augur Systems, GroundWork Open Source, and ScienceLogic—based on a long lists of criteria that were further grouped under one of the two sections: the Ability to Execute or the Completeness of Vision.  According to Williams and Curtis, “IT organizations invest in ECA tools to improve the productivity of the IT operations staff and to reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot problems by consolidating events from various devices, applications and other management tools.” 
 
ECA tools and this Gartner report are geared towards the needs and wants of large enterprises.  Even if you are not currently in the market for an ECA product, and your IT organization facilitates the needs of a small or medium sized business, or even a smaller enterprise; understanding and then applying some of the criteria that Gartner used in determining the Magic Quadrant can improve the overall viability of your IT organization.
 
Examine the soundness and logic of your business model: 
 
In today’s competitive economic climate, it does not matter whether you are an IT organization trying to sell to the public at large or you are the IT department within a company, both types of IT organizations need to focus on accountability.  For instance, before the economic down turn, an in-house IT department’s primary focus was to ensure that everything IT within the company ran smoothly—to prevent IT disasters as much as possible and fix IT issues as fast as possible—with very little consideration given to costs and prices.  Nowadays, many companies factor in their IT departments in the company’s overall profitability model—they mandate the IT departments to be more costs and budget conscious because they realized that IT departments as well as sales departments should be held accountable for a company’s underlying profitability. 
 
 Understand your business audience:
 
Once again, it does not matter whether you are an independent or in-house IT organization, you need to understand your market and/or your audience.  This sounds like such a simple mantra that could be easily mastered, but perhaps due to its innate simplicity, organizations often overlook its importance.  For instance, if you are an in-house IT organization, and your company is trying to cut IT costs by integrating software programs that are ready-to-go straight out-of-the-box, then spend time researching on the best out-of-the-box solutions, and NOT how your IT department can build a better custom product that will satisfy 100% rather than 90% of the company’s needs.  Part of the equation that you might be overlooking could be that the company needs an IT product in a week—not 8 or 12 weeks.
 
 
Prioritize Customer Service:
 
The same rule still applies here—it does not matter whether you are an independent or in-house IT organization, train your entire team to emphasize the value and importance of great customer service.  If you are an independent IT organization that sells to the public, and you have poor customer service, you should already know intuitively that you will not have repeat business or referrals.  If you are an in-house IT organization, and you consistently provide poor customer service, then either the company will terminate the individuals that provided poor customer service; or in the more drastic scenario, get rid of the in-house IT department entirely and seek to fulfill the company’s IT needs with an independent company.  Even if you provide top-notch technical support and the best IT services in your market, do not underestimate the power of great customer service.  Simple acts such as being on time, being courteous, and taking the time and effort to satisfy your customers’ questions and concerns can have huge impacts on the viability of your IT organization.
 
In order to thrive in today’s competitive climate, IT organizations, both in-house and independent, can no longer just primarily focus on delivering the best technical services; but they must also incorporate a logical business model that fits well into their existing and emerging markets, while providing consistent great customer service.

]]> http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/it-strategy/improve-your-it-organization/feed/ 0 Self-Service Service Desk a Priority for 2009 http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/service-catalog/self-service-service-desk-a-priority-for-2009/ http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/service-catalog/self-service-service-desk-a-priority-for-2009/#comments Mon, 07 Sep 2009 22:33:34 +0000 Jon Unger http://www.smallcart.com/extremesm/?p=68 Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) recently published their research for Enterprise Trends in the Service Desk for 2009. In this survey they interviewed 158 respondents on the future vision of the Service Desk Strategy at their own organizations. EMA found that enabling Self-Service technologies for their business customers was on the top list of priorities for the Service Desk in 2009. Their study found that 56% of their respondents have already deployed or are planning to deploy a service catalog. Also an overwhelming 82% of the respondents are looking to make improvements in their customer satisfaction of their Service Desk. With the top priorities of the Service Desk being Service Catalog, Self-Service, and Knowledge Management, we can clearly see that the IT strategies for the future will take advantage of the value in placing IT service offerings in the hands of managers and users.

In addition to EMA’s findings we have also uncovered that many CIOs either have placed self-service as a high priority or are looking to make improvements within their own Service Desk. Avaya’s CIO, Lorie Buckingham, cited that Boosting Agility was one of her top 5 current priorities in the August 17, 2009 edition of eWeek. Furthermore, Buckingham, went on to describe that the improvements made over a three year journey would increase the ease of doing business with Avaya and improve their ability to grow business without an increase in IT costs. Moving towards agile IT operations would mean significant improvements in customer and partner relationship management, operational process improvements, and the deployment of increased customer self-service capabilities.

Implementing ITIL process-based tools with an existing process are no joke to ICW Group Insurance Companies’ CIO Kevin Harris. According to a recent case study in Insurance & Technology Magazine, Harris was able to improve ICW’s incident management resolution times by approximately 90% and reducing the help desk personnel costs by 25%. This journey required optimization within Incident Management and integrating their ITSM tool with processes such as Change and Asset Management. “The net result,” according to Harris, “is that we significantly increase[d] overall customer satisfaction.”

EMA also stated in their trend analysis that in 2009, the service desk is still expected to continue its role as a central component in any service support and delivery strategy. Also, that CIOs are continually looking for ways to leverage the service desk to meet corporate expectations for IT service functions despite budget reductions. They also stated that organizations are looking towards process improvements and improving customer service in the Service Desk that will reduce the overall total cost of supporting the business.

Perspective

Many organizations are seeing the value in implementing a strategy towards improving the customer service and reducing the cost of the help desk by providing Self Service capabilities. Be it, the service catalog, a knowledge base, or the ability to open Incident Tickets via the web. As the Internet and Technology have became more a part of our everyday life from being able to buy a book on the internet to the replace of email to the written correspondence we see the technology makes life easier once it has been fully implemented and adopted.

I remember back in 1997 when the web was relatively fresh and new. The ability to send an email directly to a webmaster from a CGI scripted web form made my life easier when I wanted to correspond to a webmaster. This technology allowed me to quickly send the information I wanted to transpose without opening up an email application. Today, I can order a pizza online and visually see each step of the order delivery process along the way.

Sometimes the corporate environment is a bit behind in developing solutions that the consumer culture has already embraced. My perspective is that in the near future, once the service catalog and self-service capabilities become the norm, business customers will be able to track their IT order from start to finish. They will see what department is fulfilling their order and will have an accurate estimated time of delivery for their request. Maybe someday, we’ll hear stories of IT organizations being able to deliver fully provisioned desktop PCs to their business customers in 30 minutes or less.

Sources

Erickson-Harris, Lisa (2009, June 15). Enterprise Trends in the Service Desk 2009. EMA Advisory Note.
(2009, August 17). Priority List. eWeek, [26(14)], 43.
O’Connor, Nick (2009, August/September). Trouble Tickets No Longer Trouble. Insurance & Technology, [34(6)], 19.

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