Your IT service desk is the heart of the support operations of your company. It is the frontline for engaging with end-users, the face of your IT organization and a critical service to keep your users and business processes running smoothly. IT support and the processes the Service desk manages also likely represent some of your largest staffing investments. Ensuring your service desk processes, tools and employees are operating at peak efficiency is essential for both cost management and ensuring service quality.
The good news for IT leaders and service desk management is that you aren’t the only company with an IT service desk and the challenges, needs and opportunities you face are not unique. For most companies, IT service desks can leverage standardized job roles, process best practices, and outside-the-box tool capabilities – eliminating the need to determine these needs yourself. Utilizing IT service desk best practices within your organization can not only lead to better cost performance but also enable you to provide better quality service to your user community.
The key driver behind most IT service desk best practices is scalability. Service desks are typically large-scale operations (with many support agents). With this scale comes an increased need for efficiency. A few extra clicks, an inefficient process step or a lack of supporting information that slows ticket resolution by 10–20% may not seem like big deals individually (a few minutes on a ticket). When you multiply inefficiencies by the number of agents or number of tickets your IT service desk manages during a typical day, even small impacts are magnified and become costly to your company.
Leveraging IT service desk best practices can help your company establish a baseline level of productivity as other companies have achieved. That’s good because it means your costs will be comparable too. IT service desk best practices also enable you to refine, tune and optimize your operations – addressing process bottlenecks, improving the quality of service and leveraging new technology to improve support performance. While you could identify improvement opportunities yourself and develop your own solutions, that takes time and limits you to only the ideas you are able to develop internally. IT service desk best practices give you access to the collective learnings from the entire IT industry.