Good Servicedesk - Bad Servicedesk

I have been sharing my experiences on Implementing and Supporting our Customers. I thought maybe I should also share what were the gaps in our current process and How we fixed them. Although these ideas are directly applied to our Support team, they are very much applicable to a good Servicedesk team too

Lets start off with what a Bad Servicedesk team does 

• Not logging calls or Tickets - ITIL suggests that every call to service desk must be logged and this Ticket ID or SR Number must be shared to the user.Sometimes Service desk agents think Request for Information calls need not be logged as Tickets, which is wrong.
• Not understanding whether the Request be logged as Service Request or Incident - Make it a thumb rule. If a service or process fails, its an incident. Someone calls for Information or Make changes to an asset or request new license/assets, its a Service Request
• Tagging Assets - Service Desk agents often miss out the fact that Assets are the main component in an Organization, around which whole ITIL process is designed and don't tag the assets to Service Request or Incident.
• Proper Identification & Escalation of Incidents to L2 - Many a times, Servicedesk misses out the fact that there are Priority matrix designed by SLM Team and proper escalation process should be identified.
• Overpromising on ETA to get Resolution - Customer(User) may request the Agent for quicker resolution but sometimes there is nothing your Servicedesk can do and Agents succumb to pressure and give out false ETAs which is a big mistake, with SLA hanging around your neck
• Not identifying Frequently Asked Questions - Servicedesk agents are so routinely focused on replying to Tickets that they miss out FAQs and keep sending response in same manner, same content, which makes the job boring

Hope your Service Desk is not following the above methods to support the users

Now, let me point out some methods we use in our Team and How a good Service Desk should support their Customers

• Start off with a good Self-service Portal - Its not a good to have feature, it's a must have for users to reach out to the Service Desk and they can search for Solutions and even track their tickets
• Ensure Solution articles are created and Tagged for proper search - Make it a habit for Agents to share their troubleshooting steps as Solution articles. Agents should be empowered to contribute to a good Knowledge Base and tag them for easier search by users
• Proper routing of Tickets - Create Automation to handle How Tickets are assigned to the right team and right person, ensuring no delay in support and faster response time.
• Satisfaction Survey - Always send satisfaction surveys to users, and obtain feedback on the Agent response, why even entire Service Desk performance
• Maintain Low Response time and Average Agent interaction - Ensure that you give out immediate response to your customers, even if it's acknowledging their request and ensuring that you are willing to provide the right support. If possible, include some Solution links to keep conversations short and sweet. Even the user will understand your willingness to help and sharing the right information, this can lead to less Agent interaction, hence not frustrating the customer
• Use Canned Response - Ensure that your Service desk team identifies FAQs and provides feedback to SD Manager to create Canned Responses, which can be used to improve First Contact Resolutions, Average Response Time
• Escalations at right time, to right person - Ensure that your team brings in Tickets to the notice of L2 team at the right time, without frustrating the customer. Most of the time, customers get frustrated when their request is not handled and escalated to the right person on timely manner and with no proper updates. Use Automation to bring in escalations and prioritization
• Feedback to Service delivery team and improvements - There is nothing wrong in suggesting improvement via external tools or integration. Teams should always think out of box and keep researching external tools which can make Supporting customers easier and if there are some tools which can be integrated within your own tools to make life simpler, then be frank and provide feedback to the Managers. E.g. Chat integration 

I will keep adding up my suggestion experience on keeping a Happy Service Desk. Please keep in mind, Happy Agents = Happy Customers :-)

PS : BTW, Freshdesk and Freshservice check all the boxes above