The challenge
We love service desks when they help us, and we complain about them when they don’t. “Too slow to answer.” “Too slow to fix my problem.” “Not knowledgeable enough.” Whether we are internal or external customers, we expect a lot from the people on the other end of the line.
Most of us are already frustrated when we make contact. We had to go looking for help, and we want the request handled quickly. All a service desk really has to do is communicate well and resolve problems fast. That sounds easy. In practice it takes the right mix of people, process, information and technology.
Whether you run a service desk today or are about to set one up, the five areas below will improve operations and get you started in the right direction.
1. Create a circle of success
In a Forrester Research survey of more than 2,000 service desk users, 41 percent said they were “on the fence” about their satisfaction. They pointed to time to resolve requests, timeliness of status updates and staff expertise. A cycle of expectations, metrics, assessment and improvement is how you address those complaints.
Managing expectations
Before you set standards to measure the desk against, think about what the people it serves expect. Operational level agreements and service level agreements take a great deal of effort to write and review each year. A lighter alternative is to use your service management system to set what I call service level expectations.
Your system should track how long each type of incident takes to resolve. Agents can then tell callers what to expect based on history rather than guesswork: “90 percent of these issues are resolved within three days.”
Coverage expectations have changed too. The eight-hour, five-day week is long gone, and business runs around the clock. Formal surveys are the best place to start:
- If your service desk is new, ask users about their off-hours needs.
- If it has been running for a while, a survey is more accurate than call logs. Users may not be calling after hours because they don’t expect anyone to answer.
Whatever support model you choose for off-hours, users need what it takes to keep working. Publish the off-hours procedure by telephone at a minimum. A recorded message on the main service desk line works better than an online directory, because the user’s problem may be what’s stopping them from getting online.
Measuring satisfaction
Time does not heal wounds on a service desk. An unresolved problem damages the company’s reputation, employee morale and the desk’s own standing. So you need a way to find problems, and that means defining success in measurable terms. Metrics tell you how well the desk meets expectations and whether your improvements are working.
Watching for patterns
If your service desk is new, measure early and often (weekly) so you can fix early problems before they hurt the desk’s reputation. If it already exists, take a baseline first so you can measure progress against it.
Either way, look for patterns rather than one-off glitches. Small internet service providers, some with five or fewer staff, are good at this: when something breaks, they look for the pattern so they can fix it for good.
Make your service desk staff the first line of resolution before you start an improvement project. Ask your subject matter experts whether an issue needs a technical fix or a process workaround, and what each option would cost.
A simple post-contact survey
A short survey after each contact is enough to reveal service patterns. Keep it brief so people finish it.
On a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied were you with your recent service desk experience in these areas?
- Resolving your request the first time
- Resolving your request in a timely manner
- Expertise of service desk staff
- Availability of staff, in particular how quickly you reached someone
- Courtesy of service desk personnel
How does this experience compare to past experiences?
- Much better
- Somewhat better
- About the same
- A little worse
- Much worse
Acting on what you find
When a pattern surfaces, through survey results, complaints or your own agents, start improving. That may mean staffing changes (training, coaching or replacement), process changes (a workaround or a new procedure), technology (a fix), or some combination. After the change goes in, keep watching the metrics to confirm it solved the problem.
2. Follow proven leaders
Best practices are the most valuable resource you have. Compare your current practices with those of organizations of similar size and industry. Where do you compare well, and where do you fall short? If you want to lead your peers, find out where you stand today and measure your progress each year.
If your service desk is still in planning, consider off-the-shelf software. Good packages are built on best practices and deliver value soon after installation, which saves you the cost and time of reinventing the wheel. Before you decide your desk is too unusual for packaged software, ask whether you are planning for problems you don’t have and probably won’t. Software that covers most of your needs can save a great deal of money, and rare situations can usually be handled with a workaround or a customization.
When you evaluate software, ask your service desk staff to use their professional associations. Colleagues at other organizations can tell you which packages have worked well for them.
A note on vendors: reputable vendors want their customers to succeed, and being a good customer has rewards. I worked with a Fortune 500 company that evaluated several vendors, chose and implemented quickly, and gave the vendor useful feedback. The vendor invited it into its product improvement program and gave it preferential treatment.
For complex projects, consider a systems integrator. The further the project reaches, the more this decision matters. When a service desk connects to CRM systems, call center technology and broader business processes, integration expertise becomes essential. Do your homework.
3. Keep improvement projects short, small and simple
When surveys or complaints point to a specific weakness, close the gap with an improvement project. Several small steps protect the desk from taking on more than it can handle. Shorter projects, smaller teams and simpler fixes work better.
Long projects stall
Improvement projects most often overrun because teams wait for the new process to be completely finished before anyone uses it. Start testing early, on a limited basis, to learn what works. Good communication makes an early release acceptable, and an early release exposes mistakes while they are still cheap to fix.
It is better to implement half a solution that solves part of the problem than to wait a long time to solve all of it. I mean “half-fast,” not “half-baked.” Never cut necessary design work to save time; if you halve development time, make sure it doesn’t cost more after go-live. The point is to stop teams from building roadblocks that aren’t really there.
Solve the pattern, not the exception. Often the second half of a solution covers theoretical what-ifs. Don’t ignore them, but recognize that they may belong to a different project team, or that your service desk staff can handle them with a workaround.
Long projects, especially ones without a firm timeline, get derailed:
- Enthusiastic team members, or worse, project owners, get reassigned partway through.
- Commitment and morale fade, and the project drifts.
- Bigger, supposedly more important projects arrive and push yours aside.
- Budgets tighten and the project gets switched off.
One to two months is short enough to hold interest and long enough to produce a result, provided the scope is narrow and well defined. Users also absorb change more easily in measured doses. Define the project in terms of incremental payoffs so each stage is worth something on its own.
Smaller teams decide faster
A small team of capable people beats a twenty-person team. Three seems to be about right, because decisions get made quickly. Larger teams create chains of dependency (“I can’t do this until he does that and she does the other”), sometimes called the deadly embrace, and accountability gets lost.
With a small team, choosing the right people matters more, both individually and as a group. Between them they should have budget, authority, knowledge and ability. Everyone wants good people on their project, so check that your candidates aren’t spread across too many others; a person on too many projects finishes none of them.
Include an executive sponsor with enough influence to make the business process or organizational changes the project needs, and to win support from other leaders.
4. Build a culture that tries new things
Not every idea works. Treat the ones that don’t as lessons. That doesn’t mean ignoring accountability, but if the culture punishes people for open thinking, they will stop suggesting improvements.
Enthusiasm is one of the clearest signs a project will succeed, within the service desk team, across the company and among external users. Before and during a project, explain what it will change for internal and external customers. A regular report or newsletter keeps people informed and interested.
Information should move freely among agents, users and management. Build time into the project for telling people what is changing and where things stand.
Hiring, training and retaining
Your agents are the largest part of the culture, so hire carefully. Agents can be trained in subject matter, but a pleasant, helpful, communicative personality is hard if not impossible to teach.
If you are staffing a new desk, plan how you will hire, train and manage the team. Use proven assessments of communication skills and personality traits that fit the role and your culture. Don’t rely only on interviews, where candidates control the conversation and show their best side. If you already have staff, use assessments to find gaps that need coaching or training.
Beyond knowledge and communication, agents must handle stress and irate callers. People tend to repeat past behavior, so avoid hypothetical questions like “What would you do in this situation?”, which usually get the textbook answer. Ask candidates to describe a specific difficult situation, then ask, “What did you do?”
Besides on-the-job training, consider formal, ongoing development in both technical and business skills. Industry organizations such as HDI® offer seminars, accreditation programs and videos.
Protect the training budget. Managers often find it easier to cancel a session that pulls agents off the phones than to risk short-term service issues. But moving training sends staff a message that erodes morale. Companies call employees their biggest asset and then fail to develop them. We measure equipment fatigue and mean time between failures; I think of training as preventive maintenance for people.
5. Celebrate success
When a project is finished and the results show real improvement, take the opportunity to recognize the people who did it. Recognition tells your service desk staff the company values them, and it changes how users see the desk.
Celebrating also marks the end of the project, which signals to everyone else that IT projects do finish.
- Feature the results in your newsletter or a special bulletin.
- Share specific improvements through anecdotes and survey numbers.
- Publish interviews with people on both sides of the desk.
- Highlight positive user comments.
The more good news you publish about the service desk, the easier it is to get funding for the next improvement. And host an event to mark the milestone. Putting these often faceless people in the spotlight builds pride and motivates the team.
Wrapping up
Watch your metrics and listen to customers and staff. When a problem forms a pattern, fix it quickly with a small, decisive project team. Tell customers how you are fixing it. When the metrics improve, credit the project team and your agents. Be generous with recognition and sparing with blame when a project falls short, then try again. That is the circle of service desk success.