Contacting service desk shouldn’t be the stressful experience it’s stereotyped to be, whether the user forgot their password or their machine just won’t play ball.
The user will always want a quick and simple solution, not an auto response about a 24-hour window for someone to get back to you, it is all about providing service and getting people back to their work quickly and effectively.
In order to provide clients with the best possible outcomes there are a few things that are essential:
Timeliness: Under most contracts Service Level Agreements are structured on meeting a response time target, but ultimately your end users are looking for an effective solution, i.e. you may be hitting a high response time but if the end user is contacting you frequently for the same problem your client isn’t going to be happy.
Background knowledge: Obviously there will be times when users are calling to resolve a certain issue multiple times, in that instance minimising the end users frustration is key. One major way to solve this is providing consistency in background knowledge i.e. there the less information the end user is required to provide the agent before they have a grasp on what you’re calling about, the better.
Escalation: There will be times a service desk agent isn’t going to be able to support the outcome, when that does happen how easy is it for them to escalate the matter up, does a duty manager have to review all escalation requests before they can get moved?
Communicating and Meeting Expectations: Your end-user needs reasonable expectations set up front and adhered to there’s nothing worse than promising a deadline and not meeting it. If your service desk isn’t going to be able to respond in 24 hours, don’t set the expectation in the auto-response. Inevitably there will be times were your service desk is incredibly busy, send out an email to all open tickets informing them of the delay and offer an alternative way to escalate their issue if it’s urgent.
If you’re not getting the most out of your service desk, contact us today to see how we can help.
If you’re looking for consultancy services to help design your own IT business processes, contact Starboard IT to find out what we can do for you.
