IT Service Desk Modernisation, key considerations

At the outset of Covid-19, most businesses switched from being contactable by phone to being contactable either on-line or by email. IT Service Desks were not an exception to this, and with on-going digital transformation and the use of new technologies ever since, people are now increasingly accepting on-line support channels and self-service as the norm. However, just because people accept it as the norm doesn’t mean that your organisation’s shift left initiatives should ignore what is best for the user and customer in the pursuit of adopting new ways of working.

Let’s look at the pro’s of shifting left, and there are many. At the heart of shift left is skilled IT Service professionals making their knowledge readily available to their users and customers when required. This means users and customers having unlimited access to knowledge articles, finding answers to their questions via AI-based chat and FAQs, and interacting with an agent via live chat if needed.

This flexible approach gives users and customers a choice of how they want to interact with an IT Services organisation. It also means that CIOs and Heads of IT Services can deploy their Service Desk teams in value adding ways rather than them picking up and dealing with standard tasks that can be easily automated. It also makes aligning Service Desk staffing levels with business peaks and troughs more predictable, and less costly.

Shift left initiatives need to be carefully thought through when being introduced. The further left an organisation goes and the more communication/support channels that are introduced, the more reliance will be placed on effective processes in areas such as Incident Management, Service Catalogue, and SLM at the back end. At the front end, services need to be carefully described, and easily available/accessible, with constant input from users and customers to help define KPIs, metrics and measurements, that customer satisfaction and continual improvement can be based around.

A degree of acceptance is needed that the user and customer are not IT professionals, and by shifting too far left, this can end up causing issues rather than providing an acceptable service. Getting an appropriate, and agreed balance between agent-based interactions, i.e. phone and chat, versus non-agent based support, i.e., knowledge management needs to be carefully balanced.

XLAs, as we have talked about before, are becoming a key success factor. If users and customers can access services in a way that they are happy with, and feel that they are supported, then customer satisfaction will be high. Ignoring what is best for the user and customer, and assuming that they can fix things themselves, in scenarios when they can’t, then the opposite of this will be true.

Shift left, and multi-channel support is exciting and rewarding, and will add substantial value when you get the balance right.

If you are at the beginning of your Service Desk Modernisation journey or are already underway and want to talk to us about what you’re doing, please don’t hesitate to reach out.