Service Desk Center

It takes practice and experience to describe something, be it a problem, a situation or even a photo. I would say that describing something or someone is an art; don’t believe me, read on and take the practices set below.

To help your Service Desk team practice their description skills, have a series of practice sessions where everyone can participate in a photo/picture description activity. After a while you will notice that your team will be able to describe incidents or problems better to 2nd level support.

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Your Service Desk is one of the most process oriented team compared to the rest of the IT groups in the organization.  What this means is that your team members are expected to follow procedures to the very last bit; especially if you attend to requests of security nature; e.g. resetting of passwords, creation of new users

Process and procedures can be rigid and restrictive.  Humans tend to slack after a while because over time, no incidents have happened even though they slacked.  Take my case for example; over a period of time, signature in forms are no longer verified because all the while, the requests that came into Service Desk are genuine, or rather, assumed to be genuine.  Just because no incidents has occurred, it does not mean that something has not happened; it also does not mean that nothing is ever going to happen.

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Before I begin this post, I want us to agree that any service desk can only improve as much as you can put in. The amount depends on the level of input you put into your training. If you want your service desk to soar and score in terms of customer service, a lot depends on your staff, their attitude, their desire and their drive level.

If we do not realize by now, helpdesk or service desk services are essentially customer service. You are measured not only by your technical capabilities but also by the level of professionalism, courtesy, timeliness and friendliness.

Apart from all the soft skills that you have been preaching to your people, the trainings provided by your external training partners, you should encourage your team to practice self improvement. Self improvement can be achieved on technical aspect, from conversation skills, going a step further with the customer, and a whole lot more. I realized in my role as a global service desk manager that no matter how hard I push all my teammates to practice self improvement, a large majority do not.
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Let’s face the facts. How many of us here believe that helpdesk agents (yes those professionals who work over the telephone aka first level support) is less trustworthy compared to your second level technical support? How many of us think that helpdesk agents are limited to low level IT request tasks? How many of us think that helpdesk agents should not have more higher access levels to perform tasks such as password resets?

The fact really, is to empower your helpdesk agents with these rights and accesses so that they will be able to serve customers’ request at first call. You actions of empowerment will result in, Continue reading »