Written by Alan Conduct, Head of Support Services at UKN Group
IT service desks should have an on-going positive impact on companies they serve. Whether your service desk is in-house or outsourced, your organisation should notice consistent operational improvements as a consequence of the work your service desk undertakes.
Service desks can operate in two ways: proactive or reactive. Proactive service desks do more than answer support tickets and reset passwords. Reactive service desks, rarely do anything other than respond to issues and aim to resolve problems within agreed service level timescales.
Businesses that want to drive forward growth in an uncertain world need IT that supports these goals, a proactive service desk that will encourage forward-thinking and innovation. If your service desk isn’t supporting you this way, then here are 5 reasons to review their performance today.
Review the Performance of Your Service Desk
#1: SLA Levels
Almost every service desk should have a service level agreement (SLA). It’s a major red flag if they don’t, or don’t make reference to SLA metrics in a monthly report. This is the minimum standard every service desk should use to hold themselves accountable: do they respond and resolve problems in a timely fashion, according to agreed timescales and priority indicators?
If your service desk is consistently failing to hit these minimum KPIs, then something needs to be done. You aren’t getting the service you’re paying for or should expect and, consequently, your team will suffer from lower productivity as a result of IT inefficiencies.
#2: Time until a customer / user receives a response
When it comes to technical issues, everything – to a customer – can seem urgent. Especially if a password needs re-setting, emails and phone lines are down, or people can’t access Wi-Fi, and someone has an international call via Skype. Many of these problems should be easily and quickly fixed, or something that customers can resolve using self-serve tools and platforms.
Service desks that don’t provide fit-for-purpose self-serve tools are slowing down your team when issues do arise. So are those that fail to respond fast enough, even if they’re still within SLA timescales, the impact on team members who can’t work will have a knock-on and effect on productivity.
#3: Customer satisfaction or Net Promoter Scores (NPS)
Service desks with happy users are good for everyone. When your team is happy, they are productive, and this has a positive impact on how they interact with each other and your customers. Service desks should embody a positive customer service mindset, putting your staff at ease when there are problems and at the same time, employing that mindset when working on more complicated long-term projects.
Poorly performing customer satisfaction responses are a clear indicator of trouble.
#4: Value for money
Whether in-house or external, do you feel as though you’re getting value for money from your service desk? Are they worth the on-going investment?
Cost-benefit analysis, assessing KPIs against performance and how happy – or not – your team is with their work are all worth weighing up against the on-going cost of working with them.
#5: Added value
Do they generate more value? Is the impact of their work much larger than the investment made in this operational area? Are they helping improve operational efficiencies and at the same time, saving your company money?
Ideally, this is what a service desk should do. Proactive service desks are worth their weight in gold, with the right combination of talent, experiences, skills, software and automated services. Balancing immediate needs against long-term goals, the right service desk should be a trusted partner of any organisation they serve, generating impactful, long-term results for those they’re working with.
For more information about UKN Group, visit their website, or call: +44 (0)845 643 6060
