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.

Share on Facebook

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.

Share on Facebook

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.

Share on Facebook