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Managing Your Service Desk for Quality and Efficiency

By on February 4, 2011 in Call Centers, Employee Managment, IT Outsourcing, Outsourcing, Top 5

TPI_Top_5 By Chris Pfauser, Principal Consultant, Compass; and James Kane, Director & Associate Partner, TPI


Editors note: Last month the parent company of TPI, Information Services Group Inc., acquired Compass, the premier independent global provider of business and information technology benchmarking, performance improvement, data and analytics services. This TPI Top 5 was co-authored by one of our Compass colleagues.

IT Service Desk management practices are evolving in response to a variety of technology innovations and new business requirements. As quality service at low cost becomes increasingly commonplace, top-performing organizations are seeking new and innovative ways to gain a competitive edge.

Here are the TPI Top 5 keys to optimizing Service Desk efficiency and value contribution:

1. Don’t just resolve incidents; manage problems. Analyze incidents and problems to identify root causes. Use this knowledge to take corrective action and drive improvement. Don’t fall into the trap of efficiently managing incidents; rather, seek to eliminate them at their source. Move beyond basic measures of incident resolution and link performance metrics to broader objectives. Clients increasingly favor a pricing mechanism where the focus shifts from quantity to quality. Be sure to integrate Service Desk measures with other parts of the IT organization and business to enable problem analysis and resolution. Use benchmarking to address three questions: What? So what? Do what?

2.  Manage contact volume. Use self-help and automation tools to reduce contact volumes and ensure that incidents are either resolved without any direct agent contact or sent to appropriate channels.  Invest in training and knowledge management databases and aim for first-contact resolution rates of 80 percent to 90 percent. For contacts involving agents, don’t just measure cost per contact; also analyze cost per resolution to assess the impact of activities outside of the Service Desk. Strike a balance between self-help tools and automation on the one hand, and the user experience on the other. Alternative contact methods, such as click to chat and video (SkypeTM) are rated highly in user experience and allow agents to manage multiple discussions in real time while leveraging contemporary social media interactions.

3. Train to retain. Use incentives and bonuses to promote “positive” turnover that moves agents up and out of the Service Desk and places them elsewhere in the organization. Avoid “negative turnover” – terminations, resignations, and poaching by other businesses. Use cross-training and “walk-a-mile” programs to build awareness of the Service Desk’s contribution. Invest in the development of industry vertical knowledge in your Service Desk staff.

4.  Get the right staffing mix. Employ a mix of veterans and new recruits. Focus on the staffing life cycle and establish strong relationships with local universities to develop a recruiting pipeline of talent. Seek staff that not only are not only highly competent in technology but can build relationships, manage conflict and develop, contribute to high client satisfaction and seek to drive continuous improvement.  Design training programs to advance people within the organization, while maintaining a supply of qualified new trainees. Incentive programs should reward both individual and team performance and involve some level of competition.

5. Strive for a balanced sourcing strategy. Seek a balance between in-house and outsourced functionality; one that achieves cost efficiency with the highest service quality. Segment contacts and direct them to appropriate channels. Route standard and simple tasks to self-help options and automated tools. Send basic inquiries to junior staff and offshore centers to further leverage cost efficiency. Complex problems and inquiries from high-value users should go directly to experienced agents and specialists. Develop consistent criteria and tightly coupled procedures with the “feet on the street” organization when a dispatch of service is required.

The experts at TPI and Compass can help you meet your service desk challenges through industry experience and specialized knowledge of your industry. Contact Chris Pfauser, Compass, or James Kane, TPI, for more information.

About isg

Analyst at ISG.
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  • http://www.Infosys.com Rohit Nand, Principal Consultant, Infrastructure Transformation Consulting services

    The above pointers have explicitly detailed the solutions and approach towards tackling some of the challenges of the Service Desk.
    Service desks are constantly evolving and in our experience there are three key newer areas organizations are focusing on -
    1. Use of lean methodologies to ensure optimal usage of resources, productivity and higher customer satisfaction by identifying areas of “waste” such as waiting, rework, overproduction & “gold plating”, duplication of work etc. and eliminating them via usage of lean levers such as pooling of resources, ticket segregation, skill based routing and establishing clear boundaries of service.
    2. Sound Knowledge management system such as a KEDB, quick fix solutions for frequently encountered issues – enables knowledge sharing, reuse of solutions avoiding trial and error approach and obviously kept constantly updated with new and better solutions for quicker resolution. Knowledge management should also include a clear view of the committed SLA for every service, user entitlements, categorization of severities of the incident etc.
    3. Contact volumes can also be managed and reduced further if the service desk is interlocked with the event management and monitoring team where the Service Desk has a real-time view of current outages and performance issues ahead of users contacting the service desk. These inputs along with the estimated time to restore when fed into the telephony IVR system or as tickers/banners on the support page will help avoid users waiting to talk to the support staff and multiple ticket creation.
    Apart from these points, we need to look at the Service Desk function as part of a larger system and not in isolation. We need to focus on reducing the incident costs by increasing resolution on first call. In addition, mechanisms for incident avoidance (like self-help, auto password reset, online ticketing tools etc.) should be put in place.