What are the most important service desk management trends to follow?

It's essential to strike a balance between the efficiency gains of AI and the human touch in customer interactions. While AI can expedite tasks, it must not replace the empathy and understanding that human agents bring to customer support. Therefore, ITSM tool vendors must approach AI integration empirically, ensuring that these technologies enhance rather than detract from the customer experience.

Service desk management is undergoing a notable shift with the widespread adoption of automation and artificial intelligence (AI). This trend is transforming service delivery by reducing costs, boosting productivity, and expediting solutions. Automation and AI introduce self-service portals, chatbots, knowledge bases, ticketing systems, and remote support tools, handling routine tasks efficiently. While offering significant benefits, these technologies also present challenges and opportunities. Service desk managers must navigate issues related to the quality and security of automated systems, ensuring seamless integration with existing platforms and processes.

A notable trend in service desk management is the heightened emphasis on customer experience (CX). This refers to how end users and customers perceive and feel about the service desk and the broader IT organization. Factors influencing CX include the speed, quality, and consistency of service delivery, ease of access and communication, personalization, and feedback mechanisms. Service desk managers must adopt a customer-centric mindset, employing tools like customer satisfaction surveys, net promoter scores, customer journey maps, service level agreements, and feedback loops. These tools help measure and enhance customer experience, ensuring a proactive approach to meeting user expectations.

Para poder generar una buena experiencia de gestión de mesa de servicio con el cliente o un usuario final, es recomendable mantener una buena y eficiente comunicación, estar siempre atento a los detalles para poder ofrecer soluciones efectivas y rápidas que permitan obtener una buena calidad del servicio.

Service desks are undergoing a cultural shift towards customer-centricity, with organizations prioritizing the needs and preferences of users above all else. This involves fostering a customer-focused mindset throughout the organization and aligning service desk operations with broader CX goals. Service Desks in the Tech Industry are prioritizing the delivery of effortless experiences. This includes reducing wait times, simplifying processes, minimizing user effort required to resolve issues. We are soliciting feedback from users regularly to understand their experiences and identify areas for improvement. This feedback is used to refine processes, enhance service quality, and address pain points.

I’m a bit surprised that BRM’s role is not mentioned. The business relationship management is key to understanding business needs, trends, challenges and aligning IT service accordingly. It’s also important to understand that not all users are customers. Even if everyone deserved an appropriate service level and a good experience, just customer defines the limit to which the service has to.

Service desk managers must embrace and adapt to agile and DevOps, ensuring the service desk is seamlessly integrated into the service delivery pipeline. This involves employing agile frameworks like Scrum or Kanban for organization, using DevOps tools such as Jenkins or Ansible for automation and monitoring, and implementing practices like continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous feedback to uphold service quality and performance. Aligning with agile and DevOps principles ensures service desk management keeps pace with the dynamic demands of IT service delivery.

One of the primary challenges in remote work environments is ensuring the security of IT assets and data. With employees accessing corporate systems and data from various locations and devices, the risk of unauthorized access, data breaches, and cyber attacks is heightened. Service desk managers must implement comprehensive IT asset management practices to track and monitor the use of IT assets across the organization. This includes maintaining an inventory of all devices and software applications, tracking their usage and access permissions, and ensuring that proper security controls are in place to protect sensitive data.

I think that development of traditional skills has always been a key for growth and employee engagement overall but it’s even more important now that AI has entered the mix. With AI and automation hopefully replacing a lot of the mundane and menial tasks for frontline agents, tons of time and potential are about to be unlocked. Managers and other leaders in the Service Delivery team need to be hyper focused on using this as an opportunity to engage their team members more directly and to guide them into areas of value. At the end of the day, copy/paste is NOT a skill but it IS something frontline agents spend a lot of time doing

The 'most important' Service Desk strategy is the one that is best aligned with the needs of your organization. The newest technology or approach to managing IT Services is only valuable if it meets the needs of your organization.

Enterprise Service Management (ESM) continues to emerge as a prominent trend in Service Management, revolutionizing how organizations approach delivering and managing services across their entire enterprise. ESM extends the principles of Service Management beyond traditional IT departments to encompass other business functions such as HR, finance, facilities, and customer service. This holistic approach enables organizations to streamline processes, enhance collaboration, and improve efficiency by leveraging a unified platform for service delivery and support. By adopting ESM practices, organizations can break down silos, increase visibility into service operations, and ultimately deliver better experiences for both employees and customers.