Five Service Desk Tips for Your Organization

Featured article by Nancy Van Elsacker is president of TOPdesk US

The effectiveness of your services depends on various factors that you must always keep in mind, as well as how solutions, such as service management solutions, can and do benefit the organization. Nancy Van Elsacker, president of TOPdesk US forward these five tips to help make your service desk as successful as possible.

1. First of all, you must invest in your service desk: Make sure you have the best employees possible and the best tools and solutions available for their use. The service desk is the face of your IT department, and, therefore, has the most effect on your user satisfaction. Providing the best and fastest service possible to your end users also can keep your IT chain costs as low as possible for your organization.

2. Make sure your end users experience IT as an addition, as a benefit to them and their work, so that they always remain satisfied. Insomuch, it is vitally important to know what is going on with a user and how they best accomplish their daily and regular goals. So, for example, you need to understand which processes are they dealing with that are the most difficult or overwhelming to manage? Something else to take into account is when your service desk will be available. Simply keeping the desk open during normal business hours, such as 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. is mostly likely not going to work for most organizations operating in always-on, highly competitive markets.

3. Every strong and leading organization should ensure that the service desk remains the owner of each call, every time. A call should never be passed around from operator to operator or between various operator groups. As long as the service desk maintains operational management of a call, the end users know what, or who, their point of contact is. Moreover, it is a useful incentive for calls that have been open for a while.

4. Let end users do as much as possible themselves. You can tell a user what needs to be done but letting them do it themselves – or even having it done automatically – is much better for the service desk and the end user.

5. Coordinate all technology and tools. Everything should link to and enhance each other. A tool is not the goal in and of itself; it is how it is used to serve clients that provides the real benefit of the organization. The service management solution can be used to classify processes and workflow, for example, and to streamline communication with members, teams and clients.

Nancy Van Elsacker is president of TOPdesk US (www.topdesk.com), a global provider of IT service management software, services and solutions.