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Table of Contents
Chapter 1:
Tired of Firefighting? It’s Time for a Service Desk . . . . 2
Introduction . . . 2
Understanding Service Desks . . . 2
From Siloed to Centralized Service . . . 2
From Reactive to Proactive Resolutions . . . . 2
From Manual to Automated Processes . . . 2
From Internal to External Knowledge Access . . . . 3
From Incident- to SLA-Oriented KPIs . . . 3
Chapter 2:
Beware the Seven Deadly Sins . . . . 4
Introduction . . . 4
1) Growing Call Volumes . . . . 4
2) Increased Training Costs . . . . 4
3) Increased Call Escalations . . . . 5
4) Duplicate Effort . . . 5
5) Inconsistent Response . . . . 5
6) Long Resolution Time . . . . 5
7) Lost Expertise . . . 6
Chapter 3:
Three Essential Process Automation Capabilities . . . . 7
Introduction . . . 7
1) Automating Repetitive Tasks . . . . 7
2) Automating Ticket Generation . . . . 7
3) Designing Business Rules . . . 8
Chapter 4:
Getting Self Service Right with Six Simple Steps . . . . 9
Introduction . . . 9
1) Use a Familiar Look and Feel . . . . 9
2) Keep it Simple . . . . 9
3) Focus Self-Service on Non-priority Issues . . . . 9
4) Leverage Your Phone System . . . . 9
5) Provide Access to Your Knowledge Base . . . . 10
6) Don’t Make Customers Repeat Themselves . . . . 10
Chapter 5:
Three Keys to Lowering Your Total Cost of Ownership . . . 11
Introduction . . . . 11
1) No Hidden Upgrade Costs . . . . 11
2) Customization Without Coding . . . . 11
3) Ease of Ongoing Administration . . . . 12
Chapter I: Tired of Firefighting? It’s Time for a Service Desk
Introduction
As your business grows, managing IT services becomes more complex and requires a new approach and new tools . A help desk was the right solution in the early days . Users would call with an issue, and technicians would attempt to fix it as quickly as possible . IT was predominately in a firefighting mode and help desk software had a fairly singular focus: track-ing incidents and open tickets as responsibility passed from one person to another .
In order for your business to scale, you must move from a world of firefighting to one of forward planning and preventa-tive maintenance . If you’re ready to shift from reacpreventa-tive technology support to proacpreventa-tive business service support, then it’s time for a service desk .
Understanding Service Desks
This five-part series explores how to transform a classic help desk into a service desk that operates as an information hub, centralizing business service support for all incidents, problems, and resolutions, and enabling a more proactive mode of service delivery and service support . The series begins with five recommendations that will provide the foundation for transformation success .
From Siloed to Centralized Service
First and foremost, you must shift from functional help desk silos to a centralized service desk . This enables you to provide customers with a single point of access and a coordinated frontline to resolve any problem whether it is related to soft-ware, hardsoft-ware, facilities, or human resources . In this scenario, a service request may come in through multiple avenues including phone, email, and Internet . The service desk maintains communication with the customer as the issue is routed to the necessary departments and specialists until it is resolved . In addition to improving customer satisfaction, service cen-tralization also provides the foundation for you to move to a more proactive approach, which will allow you to increase efficiencies and lower costs .
From Reactive to Proactive Resolutions
With the centralization of services comes the centralization of data, which is essential in enabling you to shift from reactive to proactive resolutions . Classic help desks were plagued by the lack of centralized information . The traditional approach forced IT to stitch together bits and pieces of siloed data in an attempt to get a complete view of a problem . Often, IT would react to fix one issue, only to later discover that the fix caused another – potentially more serious – prob-lem . A service desk alleviates the guesswork and enables proactive incident and probprob-lem management by providing more comprehensive view and more robust reporting and analysis . This enables you to reduce service disruptions through earlier detection, more effective prioritization, and faster identification of the root cause of incidents .
From Manual to Automated Processes
From Internal to External Knowledge Access
Another recommendation is to provide customers – not just internal technicians – with access to your knowledgebase . In this scenario, although accessing answers from the same verified source, self-serve business users will typically view a sub-set of the overall knowledgebase available to technicians . Customer experience research continues to show that customers highly value the ability to manage and serve . This is good news because the Help Desk Institute reports that self-service transactions cost nearly 50 percent less than phone transactions . By shifting from internal to external knowledge access, you can increase customer satisfaction and lower per-transaction costs by enabling customers to efficiently find their own answers .
From Incident- to SLA-Oriented KPIs
While monitoring incident-oriented key performance indicators (KPIs) will not lose its importance, customer service-level agreements (SLAs) will move to the forefront of your management focus with a service desk . Too often, IT and business do not speak the same language . IT-centric numbers mean nothing to business users, and business users do not understand why their issues are not classified as “urgent .” Implementing service-level agreements enables you to bridge the gap by defining shared metrics that help everyone to communicate effectively . With SLAs in place, business has a better under-standing of what impacts resolution responsiveness and IT has a better underunder-standing of what impacts user productivity and customer satisfaction .
Chapter II: Beware the Seven Deadly Sins
Introduction
As you transform to a proactive service desk, beware of the seven deadly sins that historically plagued help desks, making it difficult to break free from firefighting:
1 . Growing call volumes 2 . Increased training costs 3 . Increased call escalations 4 . Duplicate effort
5 . Inconsistent responses 6 . Long resolution times 7 . Lost expertise
To provide a more proactive mode of service delivery and support, you must avoid committing these sins with your service desk . Chapter II explores these seven deadly sins and reveals how they can be avoided or neutralized with an integrated centralized knowledgebase .
1) Growing Call Volumes
A primary cause of growing call volumes is the inability to leverage an existing solution to a repeated problem . Look for a knowledgebase that enables technicians to quickly capture a new solution in a knowledge article with an easy-to-use tem-plate, when a new problem is diagnosed and resolved . This will lower the burden of populating the knowledgebase and ensure the new solution is immediately available to others . Additionally, the knowledgebase should simplify the process of finding solutions . For example, technicians should only be required to type a few symptomatic words to obtain a list of best solutions .
In the spirit of being proactive, the knowledgebase should automatically alert technicians and managers of problems that are being encountered repeatedly by generating a categorized top-ten list of solutions . This ensures technicians are fore-warned and well prepared should they encounter one of the recurring problems . Additionally, look for a knowledgebase that flags recurring problem knowledge articles and permits managers to seamlessly publish articles to a self-serve website, enabling customers to access answers directly . This yields a dual benefit of reducing call volume and increasing customer satisfaction .
2) Increased Training Costs
In today’s world, the only constant is change . Your technicians are under tremendous pressure to stay current on new products, new problems, and new solutions . Add employee turnover to the mix and your training costs can quickly sky-rocket . The goal is to reduce time spent in training and increase technician confidence and competence with customers over the phone .
technicians to understand problems they are likely to encounter, which increases training retention and proficiency in responding to customers . The knowledgebase can also reduce the service desk and company jargon learning curve, which is often a barrier to efficiently finding answers, if it enables knowledge administrators to define acronyms and other environment-specific terms in a customizable thesaurus . This way, a new technician’s search for knowledge articles contain-ing “desktop” will have the same result as a veteran’s search uscontain-ing the shorthand, “PC .”
3) Increased Call Escalations
Incident escalations are expensive . According to the Help Desk Institute an incident escalated from the self-serve site to a front-line technician can increase your costs from $2 .00 to $25 .00 . If the front-line technician further escalates the call to a second-level resource, the cost can ratchet up to $80 .00 . There are also informal escalations that take place, which are more difficult to quantify, but increase your costs nonetheless .
To decrease call escalations, you need to increase the likelihood that self-serve customers and front-line technicians can find the right answers to their problems without assistance . Therefore you must make it drop-dead simple for technicians to add new knowledge, and for all users to find answers . Again, look for a knowledgebase that provides input templates so technicians can quickly author and submit new solutions . Also, consider making top-ten lists available to customers via the self-serve website . This will go a long way toward helping customers resolve their own issues and reducing escalations .
4) Duplicate Effort
Redundant effort is a waste of resources and a source of frustration for second- and third-level technicians who would pre-fer to tackle unique, challenging problems and work toward becoming more proactive rather than enduring the constant grind of firefighting .
Look for a solution that can streamline the knowledge article review process so that proposed resolutions can be verified, approved and made directly available to technicians and self-serve users . This way, front-line technicians don’t spend time researching resolutions that have been previously identified by others . The goal is to document once and reuse often . More importantly, if the knowledgebase can flag recurring issues, the information can be leveraged to initiate permanent solutions, helping you move to a more proactive mode of business service delivery .
5) Inconsistent Response
Delivering inconsistent or inaccurate responses to customers undermines technician and service desk credibility . It can cause users to bypass established processes and directly contact technicians they have successfully worked with in the past . A centralized knowledgebase can help build credibility by providing access to consistent answers, as long the information remains current and accurate . Look for a solution that combines reporting and workflow capabilities so knowledge admin-istrators can painlessly identify and promote useful knowledge and purge outdated or underused information .
6) Long Resolution Time
While there are many factors that can exacerbate resolution time–problem severity, call queues, lack of centralized knowl-edge–the resulting perception is the same: poor service .
7) Lost Expertise
High turnover is a service desk reality . Yet you can minimize the negative impact by ensuring that when seasoned tech-nicians leave, their valuable knowledge remains . This will require a culture that values knowledge sharing, as well as a centralized knowledgebase that captures information .
Look for a solution with robust reporting that can identify the best knowledge contributors by quantity and quality . This will make it possible for managers to create incentives that encourage team members share information, which will im-prove the efficiency and effectiveness of all service desk technicians .
Chapter III: Three Essential Process Automation Capabilities
Introduction
Business process automation is a primary driver of many service desk implementations . Large or small, your business can benefit dramatically through process automation, increasing efficiency and reducing costs .
While most service desk solutions offer automation of basic repetitive tasks, others take process automation to the next level through business rule designers . The right level for you will depend on the complexity of your business . Chapter 3 explores the essential process automation capabilities that every service desk solution should provide, and how they can be leveraged to streamline service delivery .
1) Automating Repetitive Tasks
Your service desk solution should allow you to automate a series of steps in a repetitive task . These task automations should be as simple to create as spreadsheet macros, but are much more powerful, able to streamline separate actions into a unified task that can be executed automatically, expediting workflow .
At the most rudimentary level, any technician should be able to automate the mundane tasks of day-to-day system usage such as incident reassignment or customer updates . This improves personal productivity because the less time technicians spend updating the system, the more time they have to resolve service requests .
The solution should enable power users to create quick-call automations that can be leveraged by others . For example, there may be some tasks that take longer to log than resolve, such as password resetting . Creating the automation once, and making it available for reuse by others increases service desk efficiency .
Administrators should have the ability to create automations for more complex cross-departmental tasks such as setting up a new employee . Instead of creating separate tickets for each department, an administrator can create a call template that automatically notifies facilities to clean and setup the cubicle, telecommunications to activate the phone, and hardware to deliver the computer and open network connections . Condensing these steps into one automated task ensures consistency by driving human error out of the process .
2) Automating Ticket Generation
Your service desk solution should also be able to automatically generate tickets using email or text files . This type of au-tomation can dramatically increase the effectiveness of your system by ensuring call records are up to date with customer communications .
For example, this auto-ticket process should create and update call records, and automatically respond to customers with information from the call record, as well as allow customers to perform information queries about existing call tickets . Look for a service desk solution that includes sophisticated error handling . This way, if the automation fails to create or update a call ticket, an incident record containing the information from the incoming e-mail is generated and routed to the appropriate person; ensuring customer incidents don’t fall through the cracks .
3) Designing Business Rules
business change, you want the ability to tune your You may, for example, want to create a business rule to escalate tickets based on service levels . A wizard should guide you through the process of identifying the type of incident where the rule applies, the actions required, and the people notified at each step in the escalation . This will automatically trigger a warn-ing before the completion target is missed; initiatwarn-ing the escalation process and ensurwarn-ing the right people are involved only when their expertise is required . Keeping technicians focused increases the efficiency of your service desk . The ability to define and tune your own business rules for process automation and escalation is critical . Make sure your service desk solution can clear this hurdle with easy-to-use tools . If you need to rely on a programmer to code customized business rules, your implementation costs can ratchet up quickly .
Chapter IV: Getting Self Service Right
Introduction
Customer self-service is far from new . In fact, industry analyst firm Gartner projects that by 2010 self-service will account for 58 percent of all service interactions, up from 35 percent in 2005 . Yet many companies are still grappling with how to get self-service right .
Chapter IV reveals six simple steps you can take to help ensure customer adoption of self-service processes, reducing their need to interface with live agents and enabling you to focus service desk resources on more strategic, complex issues .
1) Use a Familiar Look and Feel
If your self-service website doesn’t look familiar, customers will become confused, which increases the time they need to spend on the site, as well as the likelihood that they’ll get stuck and need to ask for help . To reduce confusion, use the same branding and color palette of your corporate site or intranet on your self-service site . This provides a visual cue to customers that they are in the right place . Many service desk solutions enable you to configure the look and feel of the self-service site without programming by using out-of-the-box templates . If the solution allows you to modify cascading style sheets (CSS), enabling more sophisticated site customization, even better .
2) Keep it Simple
The information required of customers to report an incident is a subset of the information agents need to resolve it . Make sure the online form your customers use for self-service incident submission is clear and simple . To reduce information capture complexity and accelerate adoption of self-service processes, provide customers with a form view that differs from agents . Look for a service desk solution that allows you to suppress fields such as journal history, cost information or other internal-only details . The solution should also provide a graphical user interface for form design, enabling you to create different views without costly programming .
3) Focus Self-Service on Non-priority Issues
Some issues are best handled over the phone between agent and caller . However, one of the most frequent categories of service desk calls is also one most well suited for self-service: user provisioning . Empowering customers to submit and check the status of non-priority issues, such as user provisioning and new employee setup, can dramatically reduce your incom-ing call volume . Look for a service desk solution that provides a self-service web interface on the front end that integrates with approval workflow on the backend to ensure requests adhere to company compliance policies .
4) Leverage Your Phone System
5) Provide Access to Your Knowledge Base
Beyond submitting and updating issues, your self-service site should empower customers to solve problems . This can be ac-complished by providing access to your knowledge base . While accessing answers from the same verified source, self-serve customers will typically view a subset of the overall knowledge base available to agents . Therefore, you need a service desk solution that integrates with a customizable knowledge management system . The solution should enable you to create and publish FAQs as well as lists of known issues, making it drop dead simple for customers solve problems on their own .
6) Don’t Make Customers Repeat Themselves
If your customer was unsuccessful in solving her problem, give your agents a head start on resolving the issue by select-ing a service desk solution capable of loggselect-ing and trackselect-ing her search criteria and articles accessed on the self-service site . This not only improves agent efficiency, but also reduces aggravation by creating a smarter, higher quality interaction for everyone concerned and resulting in higher customer retention rates .
Chapter V: Three Keys to Lowering Your Total Cost of Ownership
Introduction
Total cost of ownership (TCO) has been a steady beacon in the information technology landscape since 1987, when Bill Kirwin, vice president and research director at Gartner Group, defined the model to clearly and reasonably address the real costs attributed to owning and managing an IT infrastructure in a business .
Gartner TCO identifies costs as being made up of two major components: direct and indirect . Typically, direct costs consist of labor and capital, which are easier to measure than more elusive indirect costs such as employee effectiveness or system downtime .
Despite the difficulty of measurement, indirect costs can typically represent a substantial component – as much as 60 per-cent – of the total cost of ownership of an IT infrastructure . Chapter V unveils three keys that influence indirect costs and can lower the total cost of ownership of your service desk solution .
1) No Hidden Upgrade Costs
Beyond direct costs for annual maintenance fees, you will incur indirect costs every time you upgrade the service desk solu-tion to take advantage of new vendor features . The key to lowering your total cost of ownership is identifying the hidden costs associated with upgrades .
First and foremost, determine if the solution preserves your customized business rules and automations upon upgrading . If you are forced to rip-and-replace existing customizations, upgrade costs can quickly skyrocket . Also, look for a solution with a track record of upgrades performed in hours or days rather than weeks or months . The less time-consuming the upgrade process, the lower your total cost of ownership .
2) Customization Without Coding
Whatever service desk solution you choose, you will have to custom-tailor it to your specific business . The key to lowering your total cost of ownership is finding a solution that allows you to make customizations without additional coding . For example, a user without programming skills should be able to implement and quickly tune customized business rules or process automations using various built-in wizards, tools, and configuration options .
If customization requires a skilled programmer, direct labor costs increase, as well as indirect costs, because time is money . The coding alone is time consuming, and the process becomes even lengthier, because before the customizations can be rolled out to users, the new code must be tested . If your IT staff is overburdened by other projects, you’ll have to wait in line for your changes . By the time the coded changes are ready, your business requirements or market conditions may well have changed, rendering the coded customization obsolete . Choose a service desk solution that allows mere mortals, not programmers, to create customizations . This way, your implementation remains relevant without breaking the bank .
3) Ease of Ongoing Administration
Why do some service desk solutions require three full-time administrators while others only need one part-time admin? The key is whether the system was designed with easy administration in mind .
About FrontRange Solutions
FrontRange Solutions develops software and services that growing mid-size firms and distributed enterprises rely on every day to build great customer relationships and deliver high-quality customer service . The company applies a unique combination of innovation and automation with a standards-based approach to simplify core business processes, includ-ing: IT service management; customer relationship and sales force management; and PC lifecycle management . More than 150,000 of the world’s best-known brands use FrontRange offerings to quickly improve their interactions with external and internal clients and achieve better business results . For more information, call 800 .776 .7889 or visit www .frontrange .com .
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