The state of the service desk in 2018: What do you need to know?
Article first published on IT Pro Portal on 17th January 2019
Customer experiences
are getting transformed. New technologies can enable novel experiences that
transcend both work and life. Our expectations of the companies we buy from are
greater than before, while the expectations placed on us within IT are growing
too. So how do businesses ensure they keep up with the competition? Richard
Branson of Virgin said: “If you look after your staff, they'll look after
your customers. It's that simple.”
At the core of great
customer experience is great employee experience; to achieve this, you have to
provide the right tools to do the job. More specifically, this involves working
on how you provide proactive and innovative services that can aid employee
productivity.
To find out the
current success of service desks within the enterprise, their best practices,
the challenges they face, why some organisations are struggling and what would
help, we carried out an independent study: The State of Service Desk Report. The study
evaluates data, insights, and interviews from over 12,000 global service desks
and service desk professionals across multiple industries to understand how the
service management community can learn from the best and make simple changes
that can create a lasting impact on employee experiences.
Why digital
transformation is more than a buzzword
IT teams today are
being asked to help drive business outcomes. Rather than supporting the
business, many companies are using IT to change how they operate. For some,
these requirements will be business as usual, met with cries of “But this is
what we have always done!”. Others will have to approach their jobs in new
ways. Either way, this will require a consistent level of service.
Digital transformation
encompasses all the ways that companies have to change their business models to
remain competitive. Today’s service desks can help by providing real-time
support to employees even before they request help from IT. This can be through
better management of IT services – spotting problems and solving them before
they affect everyone – and through more efficient self-service channels from
online knowledge bases through to chatbots and portals.
But how do service
desks predict incidents even before they occur? Such a transformation entails
collecting data at every stage of the IT service management lifecycle, then
converting this data into action. For example, new technologies like machine
learning can be employed as part of chatbots to solve simple problems or
provide answers to obvious issues. However, this can also learn to determine
where problems are more difficult and escalate them intelligently to the right
person within the IT service management (ITSM) team for the right solution.
As more business
services move over to digital, so the business itself will rely on getting
issues fixed faster. Just as companies try to sell in ever more frictionless
ways, so internal operations will have to improve in order to keep up. Without
this same approach internally, people will become the biggest roadblocks to
success.
The modern IT
service desk: doing more with less
For ITSM, “doing more
with less” has become an overarching principle. While this should be a positive
goal, in some circumstances it has narrowed the vision for ITSM to focus on
smaller, unit-level metrics rather than overall business outcomes.
Today, service desk
professionals rely heavily on ITSM tools and techniques to serve their
customers within the business. The volume of support requests has continued to
grow, while the budgets available for ITSM and support have remained static or
even shrunk. Today, our research corroborates this with the following findings:
- There is an average of 15 agents for every
1500 employees
- The average time to resolve a ticket is 10
hours
- The ratio of tickets to technicians is
120:1
What can ITSM teams do
to get ahead of this problem? By looking at the wider issue – rather than at
the simple problem of more tickets – ITSM teams can look at how to automate
more activity. Automation and versatile workflow configuration have improved
the service desk efficiency of our research base by 25 per cent on average. It
has also reduced the issue of how to manage interactions outside the realm of
IT – now, only seven per cent of these organisations’ service requests require
approval. This removes one of the major blocks on delivering better service.
Proactive versus
reactive
Today’s IT service
desks need to be aligned with core business outcomes and critical success
factors in order to be able to operate efficiently. Unfortunately, we’ve found
that 52 per cent of service desk professionals aren’t satisfied with their
current service desk solution. Furthermore, fire-fighting problems attribute to
the most amount of time spent by service desk professionals. Around 69 per cent
of service desk professionals spend the majority of their time sorting out
issues due to heavy workload and inefficient problem management processes.
While incident
management aims to resolve incidents and restore service back to normal,
problem management is more proactive and looks to identify the root cause of
these incidents. During our research, we found that service desks that used
third party problem management systems managed to reduce the volume of
incidents by 40 per cent. These service desks have identified recurring
incidents, highlighted them as problems, and been able to reduce their overall
incident numbers - thus, improving their efficiency.
By taking a proactive
approach to finding and solving problems, ITSM teams can take huge strides
towards meeting their efficiency targets. While automation can help improve
efficiency by a quarter, this proactive approach can offer far more.
The age of online:
collaboration and self-service
In our research, the
top three priorities for service desk professionals are as follows:
- Improving service desk performance
- Increasing their value to the business
- Using more automation
In our findings, we’ve
found that collaboration is a key success factor for the service desk. New
technologies like chatbots and instant messaging channels are contributing to
twice as fast ticket resolution for users. However, despite this, email
continues to dominate as the preferred method for raising tickets in the
service desk, followed by a service desk portal and mobile apps.
Online self-service is
also playing an ever-larger role in improving ITSM performance and increasing
overall customer satisfaction. It helps accelerate time-to-resolution, and
enriches service desk value and customer support on an ongoing basis.
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Our research base has
found that deploying self-service can have a huge impact. Successful
self-service installs cut down L1 tickets by 15 per cent and reduced costs by
20 per cent per ticket, on average. These service desks have helped customers
reduce the number of tickets with the help of a knowledge base - by populating
it with helpful articles, customers find the solution to their problems right
away. Due to workflow automation and self-service, around 20 per cent of the
time previously spent on solving basic tickets has been cut.
The future
Improving service is
the number one goal for ITSM teams and service desk managers. Delivering this
improvement requires both time and effort. You can create time for yourself
through smarter use of automation and self-service technologies.
However, knowing where
to put effort is more difficult. By looking at where your company is trying to
change its approach, you can see where processes are going to be needed and
where more support will be required over time. While companies look at digital
transformation, they should also look at service transformation too. Helping
employees help themselves can earn you the time to look ahead and plan for the
future of service across the whole organisation.
Learn more about optimising service desk processes
and reworking business culture at the Service Desk Transformation Summit 2019.
Download the full speaker line up and event
agenda here