Make the best use of the team

• Clearly define primary roles and responsibilities, and identify when and where escalations should occur.
• Divide the work in a way that makes the most sense based on intake patterns and categories of incidents or service requests.
• Recognize who is wearing multiple hats, and monitor to make sure they don’t burn out or struggle to keep up.
• Determine the most appropriate areas to outsource based on work type and skills required.

Build cross-training into your culture

• Primary role holders need time off and need to know the day-to-day work won’t be waiting for them when they come back.
• The knowledge base is your first line of defense to make sure incidents don’t have to wait for resolution and to avoid having technicians remote in on their day off.
• When volumes spike for incidents and service requests, everyone needs to be prepared to pitch in. Train the team to recognize and step up to the call to action.

Don’t discount the benefit of good tools

• When volume increases, so does the likelihood of missing issues and requests.
• Designate a single solution to manage the workload, so there is one place to go for work orders, incident reporting, asset data, and more.
• Set up self-serve for users so they have access to how-to articles and can check the status of tickets themselves.
• Create a service catalog to make it easy for them to request the most frequent items easily.

Standard Operating Procedures

Maturity Assessment

Categorization scheme

Improvement Initiative

IT benefits

• Improve workload distribution for technicians and enable prioritization based on work type, urgency, and impact.
• Improved communications methods and messaging will help the technicians set expectations appropriately and reduce friction between each other and their supported end users.
• Best practices and use of industry-standard tools will reduce administrative overhead while improving workload management.

Business benefits

• IT taking a customer-centric approach will improve access to support and reduce interruptions to the way they do business.
• Expectation setting and improved communications will allow the business to better plan their work around new requests and will have a better understanding of service level agreements.

Current State & Vision

Best Practices

Service Requests & Incidents

Communications

Next Steps & Roadmap

Call #2: Document roles & responsibilities

Call #5: Discuss service requests & self-serve

Call #8: Discuss communications methods

Call #10: Build roadmap for updates

Executive Brief Case Study

INDUSTRY
Healthcare

Service Desk Project

After relying on a managed service provider (MSP) for a number of years, the business hired Kevin to repatriate IT. As part of that mandate, his first strategic initiative was to build a service desk. SCC engaged Info-Tech Research Group to select and build a structure; assign roles and responsibilities; implement incident management, request fulfilment, and knowledge management processes; and integrate a recently purchased ITSM tool.

Over the course of a four-day onsite engagement, SCC’s IT team worked with two Info-Tech analysts to create and document workflows, establish ticket handling guidelines, and review their technological requirements.

Results

The team developed a service desk standard operating procedure and an implementation roadmap with clear service level agreements.

“Info-Tech helped me to successfully rebrand from an MSP help desk to an IT service desk. Sandi and Michel provided me with a customized service desk framework and SOP that quickly built trust within the organization. By not having to tweak and recalibrate my service desk processes through trial and error, I was able to save a year’s worth of work, resulting in cost savings of $30,000 to $40,000.” (Kevin Vigil, Director of Information Technology, Southwest CARE Center)

• End users who were satisfied with service desk effectiveness rated all other IT processes 36% higher than dissatisfied end users.
• End users who were satisfied with service desk timeliness rated all other IT processes 34% higher than dissatisfied end-users.

STOP

• What service desk processes are counterproductive?
• What service blockers exist that consistently undermine good results?
• Are end-user relationships with individual team members negatively impacting satisfaction?
• Make notes on initial ideas for improvement.

START

• What service process improvements could be implemented immediately?
• What technical qualifications do individual staff members need to improve?
• What opportunities exist to improve service desk communications with end users?
• How can escalation and triage be more efficient?

CONTINUE

• What aspects of your current service desk are positive?
• What processes are efficient and can be emulated elsewhere?
• Where can you identify high levels of end-user satisfaction?

The tool will help guide improvement efforts and measure your progress.

• The second tab of the tool walks through a qualitative assessment of your service desk practices. Questions will prompt you to evaluate how you are executing key activities. Select the answer in the drop-down menus that most closely aligns with your current state.
• The third tab displays your rate of process completeness and maturity. You will receive a score for each phase, an overall score, and advice based on your performance.
• Document the results of the efficiency assessment in the Service Desk Improvement Initiative.
• The tool is intended for periodic use. Review your answers each year and devise initiatives to improve the process performance where you need it most.

• Evaluate skills needed – can you upskill generalists quickly, or will specialists be required? Determine training needs for support staff on new platforms.
• Estimate uptake of the new platform and adjusting budgets – will these mostly be role-based decisions?
• Determine what applications will work on the new platform and which will have a parity offering, which will require a solution like Parallels or VirtualBox, and which might need substitute applications.
• What utilities will be needed to secure your solutions such as for encryption, antivirus, and firewalls?
• What changes in the way you deploy and patch machines?
• What level of support do you need to provide – just platform, or applications as well? What self-serve training can be made available?

Info-Tech Insight

Identify some high-level opportunities and plan out how these changes will impact the way you provide support today. Document steps you’ll need to follow to make it happen. This may include new offerings and product sourcing, training, and research.

Encourage users to submit requests through email or self-serve to keep organized. Ensure that reporting will provide you with the basics without effort, but ensure report creation is easy enough if you need to add more.

• Equipment and software license management
• Self-serve for password reset and improving the experience for end users to submit tickets
• Software deployment
• Onboarding and offboarding workflows
• Integration with monitoring tools

Even with a partner, don’t rely on them to set up categories, prioritizations, and workflows. If you have unique requirements, you will need to bring your design work to the table to avoid getting a “standard install” that will need to be modified later.

• Improving customer service, or at least avoiding a decline
• Improving access to information for technical team and end users
• Successfully taking advantage of workflows, templates, and other features designed to improve the technician and user experience
• Using existing processes with the new tools, without having to completely reengineer how things are done

1. Categorization and status codes
2. Prioritization
3. Divide tickets into incidents and service requests
4. Create workflows for onboarding and offboarding (automate where you can)
5. Track escalations to vendors
6. Reporting
7. Self-serve
8. Equipment inventory (leading to hardware asset management)

Note roles in the Incident Management and Service Desk – Standard Operating Procedure Template

• Provide an easy way for end users to electronically submit tickets and encourage them to do so. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still accept phone calls, but that should be encouraged for time sensitive issues.
• Create and update tickets, but not at the expense of good customer service. Agents can start the ticket but shouldn’t spend five minutes creating the ticket when they should be troubleshooting the problem.
• Update the ticket when the issue is resolved or needs to be escalated. If agents are escalating, they should make sure all relevant information is passed along to the next technician.
• Update user of ETA if issue cannot be resolved quickly.
• Update categories to reflect the actual issue and resolution.
• Reference or link to the knowledge base article as the documented steps taken to resolve the incident.
• Validate incident is resolved with client. Automate this process with ticket closure after a certain time.
• Close or resolve the ticket on time.

Consider opening the portal to groups other than IT. HR, finance, and others may have information they want to share or forms to fill in or download where an employee portal rather than an IT portal could be helpful. Work with other departments to see if they would find value. Make sure your solution is easy to use when adding content. Low-code options are useful for this.

Portals could be built in the ITSM solution or SharePoint/Teams and should include:

• Easy ways to create and see status on all tickets
• Manuals, how-to articles, links to training
• Answers to common questions, could be a wiki or Q&A for users to help each other as well as IT
• Could have a chatbot to help people find documents or to create a ticket

Info-Tech Insight

Consider using video capture software to create short how-to videos for common questions. Vendors such as TechSmith Snagit , Vimeo Screen Recorder, Screencast-O-Matic Video Recording, and Movavi Screen Recording may be quick and easy to learn.

49%

49% of employees have trouble finding information at work

35%

Employees can cut time spent looking for information by 35% with quality intranet

• Keep it simple: One question to rate the service with opportunity to add a comment is enough to understand the sentiment and potential issues, and it will be more likely that the user will fill it out.
• Follow up: Feedback will only be provided if customers think it’s being read and actioned. Set an alert to receive notification of any negative feedback and follow up within one or two business days to show you’re listening.

Inform yourself of how well you are doing or where you need improvement in the broad services provided.

Provide a high-level perspective on the relationship between the business and IT.

Should be sent over a duration of time and to the entire customer base after they’ve had time to experience all the services provided by the service desk. This can be done on an annual basis. For example: Info-Tech’s End User Satisfaction Diagnostic. Included in your membership.

• What kind of asset am I working on? (type)
• What general asset group am I working on? (category)
• What particular asset am I working on? (sub-category)

Create resolution codes to further modify the data for deeper reporting. This is typically a separate field, as you could use the same code for many categories. Keep it simple, but make sure it’s descriptive enough to understand the type of work happening in IT.

Create and define simple status fields to quickly review tickets and know what needs to be actioned. Don’t stop the clock for any status changes unless you’re waiting on users. The elapsed time is important to measure from a customer satisfaction perspective.

Info-Tech Insight

Think about how you will use the data to determine which components need to be included in reports. If components won’t be used for reporting, routing, or warranty, reporting down to the component level adds little value.

Need to make quick progress? Use Info-Tech Research Group’s Service Desk Asset-Based Categories template.

INCIDENTS

SERVICE REQUESTS

PRIORITIZATION

SLAs

TRIAGE & ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS

Even with a small team, it’s important to define a priority for response and resolution time for SLA and uptime reporting and extracting insights for continual improvement efforts.

• Mission-critical systems or problems that affect many people should always come first (i.e. Severity Level 1).
• The bulk of reported problems, however, are often individual problems with desktop PCs (i.e. Severity Level 3 or 4).
• Some questions to consider when deciding on problem severity include:
  • How is productivity affected?
  • How many users are affected?
  • How many systems are affected?
  • How critical are the affected systems to the organization?
• Decide how many severity levels the organization needs the service desk to have. Four levels of severity is ideal for most organizations.

Super-specialization of knowledge is also a common factor in smaller teams and is caused by complex architectures. While helpful, if that knowledge isn’t documented, it can walk out the door with the resource and the rest of the team is left scrambling.

Lessons learned may be gathered for critical incidents but often are not propagated, which impacts the ability to solve recurring incidents.

Over time, repeated incidents can have a negative impact on the customer’s perception that the service desk is a credible and essential service to the business.

Click picture for a link to the blueprint

1. Focus primarily on incidents. Service requests should always be medium urgency, unless there is a valid reason to move one to high level.
2. Separate major outages from all other tickets as these are a major factor in business impact.
3. Decide how many levels of severity are appropriate for your organization.
4. Build a prioritization matrix, breaking down priority levels by impact and urgency.
5. Build out the definitions of “impact” and “urgency” to complete the prioritization matrix.
6. Run through examples of each priority level to make sure everyone is on the same page.

• Document information so next technician doesn’t need to ask the same questions.
• Escalate to the right technician the first time.

• Check notes to catch up on the issue.
• Run tests if necessary.
• Contact user to troubleshoot and fix.
• Meet SLAs or update client on new ETA.
• Provide complete information to vendor.
• Monitor resolution.
• Follow up with vendor if delays.
• Update client as needed.

• Vendor will provide support according to agreement.
• Encourage vendor to provide regular updates to IT.
• Review vendor performance regularly.
• IT will validate issue is resolved and close ticket.

1. Set goals for time to respond and time to resolve for different incident levels, communicate to the technical team, and test ability to meet these goals.
2. Set goals for time to fulfil for most service requests, document exceptions (e.g. onboarding).
3. Create reports to measure against goals and determine what information will be most effective for reporting to the business.
4. Management: Communicate expectations to the business leaders and end users.
5. Management: Set regular cadence to meet with stakeholders to discuss expectations and review relevant metrics.
6. Management: Determine how metrics will be tracked and reviewed to manage technical partners.

• Be prepared with detailed reporting if needed, but focus on a few key metrics to inform stakeholders of progress against goals.
• Use trending to tell a story, especially when presenting success stories.
• Use appropriate media for each type of message. For example: SLAs can be listed on automated ticket responses or in a banner on the portal.

PROACTIVE, PLANNED CHANGES

Messaging provided by engineer or director, sent to all employees; proactive planning with business unit leaders.

OUTAGES & UPDATES

Use templates to send out concise messaging and updates hourly, with input from technical team working on restoring services to all; director to liaise with business stakeholders.

UPDATES TO SERVICES, SELF-SERVE

Send announcements no more than monthly about new services and processes.

REGULAR STAKEHOLDER COMMUNICATIONS

Monthly reporting to business and IT stakeholders on strategic and project goals, manage escalations.

Create reports that are useful and actionable

Reporting serves two purposes:

1. Accountability to stakeholders
2. Identification of items that need action

To determine what reports are needed, ask yourself:

• What are your goals?
• What story are you trying to tell?
• What do you need to manage day to day?
• What do you need to report to get funding?
• What do you need to report to your stakeholders for service updates?

Determine which metrics will be most useful to suit your strategic and operational goals

Be agile in your approach to service

It’s easy for small teams to get overwhelmed when covering for vacations, illness, or leave. Determine where priorities may be adjusted during busy or short-staffed times.

• Have a plan to cross-train technicians and create comprehensive knowledge articles for coverage during vacations and unexpected absences.
• Know where it makes sense to bring in vendors, such as for managed print services, or to cover for extended absences.
• Look for opportunities to automate functions or reduce administrative overhead through workflows.
• Identify any risks and determine how to mitigate, such as managing or changing administrative passwords.
• Create self-serve to enable ticket creation and self-solve for those users who wish to use it.

Staff the service desk to meet demand

• With increasing complexity of support and demand on service desks, staff are often left feeling overwhelmed and struggling to keep up with ticket volume, resulting in long resolution times and frustrated end users.
• However, it’s not as simple as hiring more staff to keep up with ticket volume. IT managers must have the data to support their case for increasing resources or even maintaining their current resources in an environment where many executives are looking to reduce headcount.
• Without changing resources to match demand, IT managers will need to determine how to maximize the use of their resources to deliver better service.

Click picture for a link to the blueprint

Create and manage a knowledge base

With a small team, it may seem redundant to create a knowledge base, but without key system and process workflows and runbooks, an organization is still at risk of bottlenecks and knowledge failure.

• Use a knowledge base to document pre-escalation troubleshooting steps, known errors and workarounds, and runbook solutions.
• Where incidents may have many root causes, document which are the most frequent solutions and where variations are typically used.
• Start with an inventory of personal documents, compare and consolidate into the knowledge base, and ensure they are accurate and up to date.
• Assign someone to review articles on a regular basis and flag for editing and archiving as the technical environment changes.
• Supplement with vendor-provided or purchased content. Two options for purchased content include RightAnswers or Netformx.

Info-Tech Insight

Appeal to a broad audience. Use non-technical language whenever possible to help less technical readers. Identify error messages and use screenshots where it makes sense. Take advantage of social features like voting buttons to increase use.

Optimize the service desk with a shift-left strategy

• “Shift left” is a strategy which moves appropriate technical work to users through knowledge articles, automation and service catalogs, freeing up time for technicians to work on more complex issues.
• Many organizations have built a great knowledge base but fail to see the value of it over time as it becomes overburdened with overlapping and out-of-date information. Knowledge capture, updating, and review must be embedded into your processes if you want to keep the knowledge base useful.
• Similarly, the self-service portal is often deployed out of the box with little input from end users and fails to deliver its intended benefits. The portal needs to be designed from the end user’s point of view with the goal of self-resolution if it will serve its purpose of deflecting tickets.

Click picture for a link to the blueprint

Customer service isn’t just about friendliness

Your team will all need to deal with end users at some point, and that may occur in times of high stress. Ensure the team has the skills they need to actively listen, stay positive, and de-escalate.

• Customer focus – Focus on the customer and use a positive, caring, and helpful attitude.
• Listening and verbal communication skills – Demonstrate empathy and patience, actively listen, and speak in user-friendly ways to help get your point across.
• Written communication skills – Use appropriate tone, language, and terms in writing (whether via chat, email, or other).
• Manage difficult situations – Remain calm and in control when dealing with difficult customers and situations.
• Go the extra mile – Go beyond simply resolving the request to make each interaction positive and memorable.

Deliver a customer service training program to your IT department

• There’s a common misconception that customer service skills can’t be taught, so no effort is made to improve those skills.
• Even when there is a desire to improve customer service, it’s hard for IT teams to make time for training and improvement when they’re too busy trying to keep up with tickets.
• A talented service desk agent with both great technical and customer service skills doesn’t have to be a rare unicorn, and an agent without innate customer service skills isn’t a lost cause. Relevant and impactful customer service habits, techniques, and skills can be taught through practical, role-based training.
• IT leaders can make time for this training through targeted, short modules along with continual on-the-job coaching and development.

Click picture for a link to the blueprint

Improve your ticket analysis

Once you’ve got great data coming into the ticketing system, it’s important to rethink your metrics and determine if there are more insights to be found.

• Collecting ticket data and keeping it clean. Based on the metrics you’re analyzing, define ticket expectations and keep the data up to date.
• Showing the value of the service desk. SLAs are meaningless if they are not met consistently. The prerequisite to implementing proper SLAs is fully understanding the proper workload of the service desk.
• Understanding – and improving – the user experience. You cannot improve the user experience without meaningful metrics that allow you to understand the user experience. Different user groups will have different needs and different expectations of the level of service. Your metrics should reflect those needs and expectations.

Analyze your service desk ticket data

• Poor ticket hygiene and unclear ticket handling
• Service desk personnel are not sure where to start with analysis
• Too many metrics are tracked to parse actionable data from the noise

Click picture for a link to the blueprint

Start doing problem management

Proactively focusing on root cause analysis will reduce the most disruptive incidents to the organization.

• A focus on elimination of critical incidents and the more disruptive recurring incidents will reduce future workloads for the team and improve customer satisfaction.
• This can be challenging when the team is already struggling with workload; however, setting a regular cadence to review tickets, looking for trends, and identifying at least one focus area a month can be a positive outcome for everyone.
• Focus on the most impactful ticket or service first. The initial goal should be to reduce or eliminate critical and high-impact incidents. Once the high-stress situations are reduced, proactively scheduling the smaller but still time-consuming repeatable incidents can be done.
• Where you have vendors involved, work with them to determine when root cause analysis must happen and where they’ll need to coordinate with your team or other supporting vendors.

Problem management

• Problem management, however, can be taught, and the issue isn’t always hard to spot if you have time to look.
• Using tried and true methods for walking through an issue step by step will enable the team to improve their investigative and troubleshooting skills.
• Reduction of one or two major incidents and recurring incidents per month will pay off quickly in reducing reactive ticket volume and improve customer satisfaction.

Click picture for a link to the blueprint