We are all looking to improve the level of
service we provide no matter what department we work in, whether it is in IT,
HR or some other multi-letter acronym. The need to improve is driven by high expectations
from your customers, internal or external. From your businesses perspective they
are calling into IT support, for example, and have no concern of what the title
of the support team is just as long as they can get help as quickly as
possible.
Depending on your IT organization the evolution
of moving from the term ‘help desk’ to the ‘service desk’ may fundamentally
mean nothing at all with the exception of the title. In essence the background
to the difference between the two was broken down to what they were meant to
accomplish. A help desk, for example is more focused on the person calling into support. They are
looking to address fixing issues that are happening right now. For example, I
can’t seem to access a particular group folder. The help desk would help this person
out by correcting or providing a way to minimize impact through a workaround. The
service desk on the other hand takes this to the next level and looks to
leveraging other teams to correct this issue for the larger business community
which makes it far more strategic.
So, is there a next natural progression from
the service desk? Is this where the customer experience specialist or team comes
into view? Don’t forget that the customers will still not know the difference
on what type of entity they are speaking with. While the intent may be the
same, the outcomes are what will be important from a customer’s perspective.
The next question you need to address is at
what point does this team then become accountable for all customer experience
activity not only with IT issues but HR ones. If this team has the skillset to
address customer concerns and is well complimented with support counterparts which
have specialties in HR or databases or facilities, how does this impact your
organizational dynamics for supporting your shared services within an
organization. Your support would then truly become a one stop shop rather than
function centric service desks.
Is this even possible?
Getting there is half the fun as the saying
goes. You really need to focus on the integration between your customer experience
team (CET) and the support teams in the various departments. There needs to be
a degree of capability in this group so that all calls which are escalated into
the CET can be triaged appropriately. There
needs to be commitment long term to nurture these relationships so that the
improvements to this team can be long lived. There also needs to be a level of collaboration
between the CET and other business functions such as the PMO, vendor management
and business relationship managers – not an easy undertaking
Taking the service desk to another level
within your organization is not going to be simple. You will need to
continually look at where you are from a service delivery standpoint and
determine what level of capability is best for your customers, the help desk,
the service desk or something new. As always I welcome your feedback.
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Labels: Continual Service Improvement, help desk, ITIL, ITSM, service desk