10 things your service desk should not be doing

www.acora.com

By Ben Whitehead

Acora - head office:Acora House, Albert Drive, Burgess Hill, West Sussex, RH15 9TN T: +44 (0) 844 264 2222 E: support@acora.com

IntroductionIt’s fair to say that the typical IT service desk has a lot to cover.

After all, from sales through to accounts, virtually all companies rely on technology to carry out even the most basic of tasks. IT infrastructure can get pretty complex, too, with staff accessing company networks from multiple locations and companies deploying an ever growing stack of applications, both locally and via the cloud.

Against this backdrop, some things are a fact of life. Systems will freeze. Software will start behaving in a way it isn’t supposed to. Your people will be bamboozled by unfamiliar pop-up messages. How do you respond to and resolve these issues? This is the true measure of end-user IT support. The end goal is to ensure that your business processes keep flowing, no matter what happens.

So, here’s the next question: How can you tell if an IT Service Desk is fit for purpose? To help you with this, Ben Whitehead, Head of Project and Support Services, lists the 10 things that should not be happening. If they are, then perhaps it’s time to consider whether your current IT support setup is due an overhaul…

Acora - head office:Acora House, Albert Drive, Burgess Hill, West Sussex, RH15 9TN T: +44 (0) 844 264 2222 E: support@acora.com

1. Routinely bypassing processes and procedures Easy reporting and swift resolution of IT issues does not ‘just happen’. For the process to run efficiently, it requires a set of procedures for reporting, handling and resolving incidents and requests.What’s more, there is little point in having a procedure if it only really exists on paper. If both end-users and the staff deployed on the Service Desk routinely bypass the procedure, there’s a good chance that it will ultimately fall apart.

So, what should this procedure consist of? The specifics will, of course, depend on the needs of your organisation. Broadly though, it should have the following characteristics:

• The procedure should be clear. End-users need to know who to report issues to, how to report them - and when. The procedure should also set

out what users should expect to happen by way of follow- up (with the expectation that this will be adhered to by the desk in all cases).

• It should be documented. This is especially important for onboarding new service desk staff - as it gives them something to quickly and easily refer to as they get to grips with your processes.

• It should be regularly reviewed and updated. As your tech stack changes (e.g. greater reliance on SaaS applications and cloud storage), it is important to ensure that the procedure addresses the specific challenges service desk staff and end-users are facing in the most efficient way.

“If the service desk staff don’t follow the rule book, then why should we?” A failure to follow procedure by front line desk staff can easily spread to other areas of IT and to end-users. This can result in issues not being addressed efficiently, causing them to escalate into more serious problems.

Acora - head office:Acora House, Albert Drive, Burgess Hill, West Sussex, RH15 9TN T: +44 (0) 844 264 2222 E: support@acora.com

2. Not logging calls, trivial or otherwise Some issues take seconds rather than hours to resolve. You might think that there is little point in recording these low-level interventions. After all, if increased efficiency is a top priority, isn’t admin reduction an obvious starting point?

In fact, from network-wide outages through to app-specific queries from staff on the ground, ALL issues and interventions, however minor should be logged by your desk. Staff on the desk need to grasp this.

Here’s why:• Measuring capacity and ROI. If the Service

Desk consists of internal employees, you cannot gauge whether that desk is adequately staffed (or overstaffed) without a FULL breakdown of their activities. Likewise, if the service is outsourced, this breakdown helps you gauge whether your partners are delivering value for money.

• Highlighting problem areas. In isolation, a minor issue with a particular piece of software or hardware may be insignificant. Repeat occurrences may indicate a deeper problem needing further investigation (regarding usability or overall stability, for instance). A failure to log all incidents makes it more difficult to assess this.

3. Basing priorities on arbitrary grounds In quick succession, three junior customer service employees report a problem concerning your CRM. The Service Desk is just about to address this when it receives a query from a senior manager relating to a difficulty in pulling a report from your BI suite. Given that the manager is higher up the food chain, the desk responds to her problem first.

There will always be those times when your desk has multiple requests to deal with. To manage these situations, it is imperative that you have a clear protocol for addressing matters in accordance with your organisation’s priorities. Equally important, your support desk needs to display the professionalism necessary to adhere to that protocol - even if that means asking a senior manager to wait in line from time to time.

4. Leaving call managementdata unrecorded or unavailable A busy Service Desk will in all likelihood have an Automatic Call Distributor, or ACD in play, which answers incoming calls and routes them to the most appropriate member of staff.

An ACD helps to streamline the communications process. If configured in the right way (e.g. with intelligent routing and dynamic call announcements), it can also go a long way in improving Service Desk efficiency. Beyond this, an ACD system can give you useful data on Service Desk performance, including the level of calls dealt with, time spent on each call, waiting times and peak times for problems. Analysis of this data can help you improve Service Desk performance.

A fit-for-purpose Service Desk provider will be transparent in making this data available to you.

5. Leaving the desk empty at lunch It is quite clearly unacceptable for your people to find themselves routinely unable to make contact with the desk at certain times of day (you wouldn’t accept this from your customer service staff - and the same goes for IT). Shifts need to be regimented - and breaks staggered where appropriate. Perception is all-important for your wider staff to maintain confidence in the Service Desk. It only takes one too many instances of people being left on the line at lunch time for staff to start ignoring critical issues - or trying to fix them themselves (with potentially damaging consequences).

6. Allowing staff to remain at their desks during breaks If technicians are routinely taking their lunch at their workstation, it can be a tell-tale sign that there are deeper problems with the way in which your Service Desk is organised.

Not least, if those technicians feel they have no option other than to ‘push through’ their lunch

hour, it could indicate that the desk is under- resourced. There’s also a wider health & safety aspect here. Lunch gives your people the opportunity to stretch their legs, to change their environment and take a break from the pressures of work. If staff are under-rested and over-stressed, it’s hardly conducive to providing a first-class service!

7. Escalating issues that could be resolved quicker (or else, not explaining the reasons why issues require escalation) Here are two scenarios that illustrate this problem:An employee has hit a brick wall attempting to connect a peripheral device to their PC. The Service Desk operative knows what needs to be done - and it’s a relatively straightforward, even though it’s a multi-stage process. The fix is not difficult - but it will take a good five minutes to walk the caller through it. In truth, the operative simply cannot be bothered with it at this moment in time. He therefore takes the easy way out, informing the

Acora - head office:Acora House, Albert Drive, Burgess Hill, West Sussex, RH15 9TN T: +44 (0) 844 264 2222 E: support@acora.com

caller that “someone will be up in half an hour or so” to take care of it all. Another employee reports a hardware issue that the Service Desk operative knows will require physical examination of the endpoint. Escalation is unavoidable in this instance - but the employee is left with the impression that the desk was unwilling to resolve the matter there and then - when in fact they were unable to do so.

With a high-functioning help desk setup, those technicians who field the initial enquiries should conduct themselves, and, (just as important) be perceived in a certain way. They are not - or should not be - mere ‘call handlers’. Here’s what you should expect:• Technicians should have clear direction on what

does and does not fall within their remit for there and then fixes.

• As a rule, no queries should be escalated to next-level intervention when they are capable of an early stage fix.

• Equally, those technicians should not attempt to cobble together a solution to get the caller off the line when next-stage diagnostics would be more appropriate.

• Where further intervention is necessary, the reasons for this should be explained clearly to the user.

• The technician should also have the ability to respond appropriately to the user’s level of know-how. Not all ‘non-technical’ staff are incapable of handling a driver install or reconfiguration themselves (given the right guidance).

8. Leaving incident management flow for “someone else” When they have a bad support experience, 74% of customers are likely to choose another business the next time they need that service. Obviously, your employees are not in a position to ‘shop around’ for alternative IT support at work, but if the service is not there, there’s a risk that they will lose faith with the procedure and opt out of using it.

It’s also about building a culture of great service throughout your organisation. If you are able to provide employees with all the support they need right when they need it (including technical support), it provides a benchmark for the type of service those people should be giving to customers.

It is often said that “business people are people, too. It’s just that they are at work”. Where possible, they prefer a single point of contact, realistic timeframes for resolution – and regular updates is resolution is going to be protracted.

Ideally, your Service Desk will take the lead here, assuming responsibility for call flows from initial notification right through to final resolution.

9. Ignoring repeated incidentsThe type of problems handled by your Service Desk can tell you a lot about how your wider IT processes and strategies are shaping up. This is especially true of multiple complaints concerning the same type of issues.• Security. Your help desk is not a replacement for

other security measures (e.g. SIEM). However, multiple reports of App-specific problems. Multiple reports relating to the same software can be an indicator that there are serious issues with the

stability or usability of that program.• Training. Are the same people frequently

reporting issues that they would be able to resolve themselves with better knowledge of the tech? The same problem in quick succession can give you an early ‘heads up’ that a problem is emerging.

For these reasons, your Service Desk should alert you of repeated patterns in call types.

10. Repeatedly asking the same questions First response engineers should and ought to be able to take appropriate notes and get to the root of the problem with ease. Absorbing the facts, assessing possible causes and giving you a clear explanation of what’s going to happen next: these are all the hallmarks of a professional service.

Want to see what best-in-class Service Desk support can do for your business? Speak to Acora today.

If you’re considering using a man-aged service provider to help deliver end-user support, why not contact Acora for more infomation. We’re happy to help.

sales@acora.com0844 264 2222www.acora.com

About AcoraAcora is a UK-based, award winning IT services and technology partner with over 25 years’ experience. We are ranked amongst the top 50 global managed services suppliers. Financially stable with a strong balance sheet, Acora currently manages contractual revenues of more than £70m and employs over 300 people.

Our vision is to provide the mid-market with an outstanding customer experience through innovation and great people and become the leading provider of IT services within 4 years.