Introduction

A Service Desk is primarily a communications centre that provides a single point of contact between a business organization and its customers, employees and business partners. The purpose of a service desk is to ensure that users receive appropriate help in a timely manner.

Service desks often act as a face of the business to the outside world. This makes managing a Service Desk a vital activity for business success. The role of the Service Desk Manager is crucial as he needs to strike a fine balance between enabling the staff to be able to deal with human emotions in the right way and managing the technical resolution aspects.

Service Desk Managers may also need to act as analysts of the data - such as Incidents data.

1. You are the Service Desk Manager. You find 2 incidents in your queue – logged at almost the same time and with the same priority and undergoing resolution, but you are not confident of their resolution. Which one should you escalate?

One of the metrics that a Service Desk abides by is the time that it can keep an incident in its queue before making a functional escalation to the second line of support. The other side of the balance is the resistance it may face if an incident is escalated without proper diagnosis. Often, conflicts arise when the second line support feels that the Service Desk is just acting as a channel to pass tickets without doing any diagnosis regarding proper categorization, information logging and checking the knowledge base for possible documented procedures.

In the situation DESCRIBED above, since the timelines are similar, we must check for the impact of the incident. Greater impact means more users are affected, and therefore, the incident with the higher impact must be transferred to the second line of support as this group possesses more specialised knowledge. Breached incidents with higher impacts often cause more user calls and increase the workload of the Service Desk, causing them to further slowdown.

If the incident was raised through a system alert, there could be an ‘incident storm’ – which is typically more and more alerts being raised as the system expects the alerts to be reset within the SLA – again, this will increase the workload of the Service Desk manifold.

2. What is the Service Desk?

A Service Desk is the single point of contact between the service provider and the users or customers. The Service Desk manages the incidents and service requests (SR), handles the communication with the user who has logged the incident or the SR.

The goal of the Service Desk is the same as that of the Incident Management process: To get normal services restored to the users as quickly as possible. We must remember that the Service Desk may not have any specialised technical or functional skills. Therefore, the only way that the Service Desk can, by itself, fulfill this goal is by referring to the documentation available to it, published by the more specialised teams. Absence of proper documentation will impair the efficiency of the Service Desk.

The IT Service Desk may resolve an incident or fulfil a SR by following the documented process steps associated with the same. E.g. a user who has called up and raised an incident that he is unable to access the Bank's website, may be taken through a series of steps by the Service Desk on the call. If this does not solve the problem the Service Desk will pass the incident to the second level of support.

For SRs, Service Desk may need to follow predefined request models and address the customers need. Once again, these models must be well documented and intuitively understandable by the Service Desk staff.

3. As a Service Desk manager what benefits of your Service Desk can you showcase to your management?

The Service Desk is a user or customer facing organisation. Often, it will act as the face of an entire business to the user community. Here lies the biggest achievement that a Service Desk may hope to make – all the customer and user communication happening via a single point of contact whether it be answering a query, addressing a service request (SR) or notifying about the status of a service. A Service Desk should always endeavour to provide improved customer service, create a positive customer perception and contribute to customer satisfaction. It should always strive to get better in terms of quality of service and speed of customer service.

The IT Service Desk should also strive to become proactive as it matures. E.g. it may notify the user when a user request is resolved versus the user having to call up the Service Desk to get an update.

Because of its unique position in the Service Delivery organisation, the IT Service Desk also has access to large amounts of data related to incidents, SRs and service level performance. The Service Desk may utilise this data to provide meaningful analysis and reports for the IT Service Management. This will ensure faster and more accurate decision making by IT Service Management. Such data may also help in identifying potential failure scenarios even before the failure happens.

Last but not the least, a high-performing Service Desk may be able to compensate for some of the deficiencies that may be present in the rest of the organisation.

4. What are the responsibilities of a Service Desk?

The first and foremost responsibility of a Service Desk is to log all relevant incidents and Service Requests (SR) with all the relevant details and updates. It must be kept in mind that the Service Desk is the owner of the incidents and the SRs that are logged. Then the Service Desk provides the first-line investigation and diagnosis and also attempts to resolve it to the best of its knowledge.

When the Service Desk cannot resolve the incident or SR on its own it escalates the same to the second level of support. If the resolution is completed by another support group, the Service Desk must ensure that appropriate resolution comments have been added to the ticket or the request. Upon confirmation from the user that all is well, the Service Desk will close the ticket or SR.

The Service Desk is in charge of maintaining a continuous communication with the user who logged the incident or SR. This communication may include details about the progress made on the resolution, tentative timelines, any workaround that could be implemented till the matter is resolved, information and assurance about the problem management activities that are going on to prevent recurrence of such an incident. After the request or incident is closed, the Service Desk may also CONDUCT a user satisfaction survey with the user.

Finally, the Service Desk must ensure that the knowledge database is updated with the most relevant information so that more incidents and service request in the future may be resolved at the first call, thereby improving the overall efficiency of the IT Service Management process.

5. if you are asked to set up a Service Desk what kind of people would you get on board?

Service Desk staff may or may not be required to have deep technical skills. However, they must have certain skills which are essential to perform as a customer or user facing organisation. First and foremost, interpersonal skills such as verbal communication on a telephone, written communication skills, ability to listen actively and showing empathy to the user who is having a problem are very important.

Service Desk staff must be trained to understand the business of the organisation. E.g. the Service Desk for a bank must be equipped with knowledge of the banking services that are provided while the Service Desk for a consumer electronics company must be equipped with knowledge about the different products that are in the purview of the Service Desk.

That brings us to the scope of service being provided – the next important thing at the Service Desk staff must know. E.g. a banking application that is available via desktop and mobile application may not have a Service Desk that caters to the mobile app issues. This may be resolved only through a ‘log issue’ button on the app itself. When a mobile user reports an incident the Service Desk must politely inform their limitations and guide the user to use the correct mechanism.

If ‘first call resolution rate’ metric is key to the business, the Service Desk may need to be equipped with deeper technical and functional knowledge so that more issues can be resolved by them rather than referring to the other support groups. Irrespective of the level of such knowledge, all Service Desk staff should have some basic diagnosis skills, which should be supported by making available the appropriate documentation.

The staff must be thoroughly conversant with the Service Desk tool because most of the time they may be at the end of a phone and have to record the issue being reported by the user. Without good tool knowledge this process will take a lot of time causing user frustration.

Finally, the Service Desk must be aware of the IT Service Management processes, especially those that would be interacting with it on a regular basis such as incident management, request fulfillment, technical and operation management functions.

6. How do you compare between two Service Desks?

Two Service Desks may be compared based on certain metrics, some of these are below.

• The percentage of calls resolved during the first contact –where the resolution has beenprovided when the user has contacted the Service Desk for the first time. This is the most desired state of Service Management. Another related metric is the percentage of calls where the Service Desk did not require to escalate the incident to the second line of support. This shows the self-sufficiency of the Service Desk in terms of Knowledge and possibly technical skills.
• Average time to resolve an incident when the Service Desk is able to resolve it.
• Average time to escalate an incident –this is a measure of the Service Desk ability to judge ITSOWN capability and understand the significance of the incident to the business; sometimes there could be conflicts with the second line of support who may feel that more incidents are being pushed to them and the Service Desk is trying to play safe.
• Average cost of handling an incident by the Service Desk –since maintaining of a Service Deskcontributes to the overall operational cost, these must be designed optimally to maximize the return on investment. Staff utilisation is important.
• Percentage of incidents where customers have been informed appropriately without delay –This ensures high customer satisfaction and keeps the communication between the business and IT service organisations smooth.
• Average time elapsed between when an incident is marked as‘resolved’ by another resolvergroup to when it is set to ‘closed’ by the Service Desk.
• Percentage of incidents where requested customer satisfaction surveys were completed. Thisis a measure of the survey process compliance and not the actual customer happiness.

7. What is ‘follow the sun’?

Global organisations may have running businesses and users all around the globe. Considering that a typical workday will not exceed 8 hours, this means that the Service Desk must be designed in such a way that users can dial in and avail services no matter in which part of the globe they reside. To ensure that the Service Desks in any region of the world do not work beyond their normal working hours, there must be multiple Service Desks set up all around the globe, in different time zones.

E.g. if an American user logs an incident during his daytime this will be handled by the Service Desk in America. If the incident cannot be resolved by them during their normal working hours, they could pass it on to the next Service Desk which may possibly be located in India. Similarly an Indian user logging an incident during his daytime may have someone based out of Europe working on it. This revolving model of Service Desk and service provisioning is called ‘follow the sun’ implying that the Service Desk operates as a single unit, but staff is active only during the normal working hours of various regions on the globe.

Implementing ‘follow the sun’ model is very useful for global businesses who can ensure that customers can be serviced at any point of the day. However, it requires a huge investment in terms of managing multiple Service Desks, ensuring that knowledge levels across all the Service Desks is uniform, language barriers are taken care of and quality of service does not degrade as the control passes from one Service Desk to another. E.g. it should not so happen that the IT Service Desk located in country X does not possess SUFFICIENT capability to resolve aging incidents, or the incident gets logged in a language which is not understood by the next Service Desk. The SLAs are likely to be violated in such cases.

When implementing ‘follow the sun’ model the Service Desk Manager must remain conscious of the risks of the staff not understanding the incident management processes and escalation mechanism to be followed during incident handling.

8. What are ‘specialised Service Desk’ groups? 

Some organisations consider certain services to be more important than others. Users who avail of these services are given access to ‘specialist groups’ directly rather than going through a generalized Service Desk. It is also possible that the user would have paid a premium to avail of such ‘priority’ services. These services are provided by the specialised Service Desk groups.

The specialised Service Desk groups are imparted specialist technical or functional training and are more familiar with the product or the service than the normal Service Desk. Usually, such specialised Service Desk will be staffed with more experienced members who may have once worked as a part of the normal Service Desk.

For the service provider, there are additional costs of maintaining such specialisation. First, the staff are required to be more qualified and consequently are more expensive. Second, more product

services training and familiarisation of the staff is also an investment. There needs to be a minimum payload of users willing to avail of the specialised service for it to be cost-effective to the provider as well as the individual user. If there is staff turnover in the specialized teams, it may be more difficult to find a suitable replacement, therefore running the risk of lower service levels at such times – this is likely to have an adverse impact on customer satisfaction. A fine balance must be achieved while establishing such specialised groups.

However, the benefits of having these are immense. The users receive priority service and Service Desk staff may consider this as a career progression, effecting staff retention.

9. What are the different kinds of Service Desks that you are aware of?

Service Desks maybe LOCAL, Centralised or Virtual.

Local Service Desks are physically close to the user community it serves. The most pressingreasons for maintaining a local Service Desk are language, cultural and political differences across regions – especially when the business is geographically spread across multiple time zones. Another reason could be the presence of a special group of users who are customers at a location.

When technical skills are important for a Service Desk, the service provider may find niche technical skills only at a location. Presence of several VIP or high-value customers at a location may prompt the business to have one, e.g. a bank having a local Service Desk in an area home to a large population of high net worth individuals.

Centralised Service Desk: On the other hand, it may be possible to keep only one Service Desk ata location. Users from other locations are still required to call up this Service Desk. If the business is spread across different time zones, this will mean that the centralized Service Desk must operate outside of their normal working hours of the location where it is situated. This optimises the cost of maintaining the Service Desk considering that fixed costs of other locations are not incurred. It may also make the Service Desk more efficient because you are all in one place and the staff can deal with any seasonal higher call volumes. However, if the Service Desk activities require physical presence such as providing a laptop to a user then a bare minimum local presence will also be required in addition to the centralised Service Desk.

A Virtual Service Desk leverages communication technology and corporate support tools to give the impression of a centralised Service Desk to users from all locations. In reality, this it may be just a toll-free number and / or a continuously monitored mailbox. Virtual Service Desks can be easily automated and latest technology such as artificial intelligence may be implemented for a more efficient working. Behind the toll-free number or the mailbox are the Service Desk team who would be located at places that possibly have a lower setup costs; it is unlikely that the users will ever know about the physical location of the person he is speaking to. Considering language and cultural barriers, some of these could also be located with the users thereby leveraging a global + local approach.

10. As a Service Desk manager what are the parameters you will consider for deciding the most appropriate staffing levels in your Service Desk?

There are several factors that must be considered when deciding the staffing levels of a Service Desk.

First, the customer’ service expectations, the business requirements, the service level agreements such as response times, resolution times, call wait times etc. Business requirements may include coverage for multiple time zones, out-of-hour support requirements, desk side support etc.

Since the Service Desk is user facing, user parameters will impact the staffing of a Service Desk as well. Most important are the user volume, seasonality during the day, week, month or year, languages understood by the users, request types, user demographics such as gender, education levels etc.

As a service provider organisation for multiple customers doing different businesses, it is also important to factor in the business of the customer. E.g. if the customer is a banking organisation the Service Desk must be quite critical as customers will generally have financial interests and impact. On the other hand if the business is related to entertainment products, it may be more useful to have a Service Desk that understands the entertainment business.

The Service Desk manager must design ‘shifts’ in a way that includes a mix of functional, technical and communication expertise to reduce the impact on the IT services at any point in the service window. Yet another determinant is the availability of an updated knowledge base that the Service Desk can refer to. As a Service Desk manager, it is most important to ensure that the Service Desk staff has access to the knowledge resources.