Best Practices for Managing Wait Times
Your company invests in providing an IT service desk because the productivity of end-users and business functions is important. Disruptions to normal business activity are costly to the company and the service desk’s primary job is to return users to work quickly to minimize the impact of these disruptions. It is understood that most technical issues take some time to resolve, which is okay. The time that users spend on-hold or waiting in a queue to engage support isn’t adding any value, it just creates waste. IT service desk best practices suggest what you can do to minimize the amount of time your users spend waiting for support – reducing unnecessary waste and helping your users resume their day-jobs quicker.
Adopt a “time-is-money” mindset
Your users’ time is valuable. Every minute they spend waiting for IT support is a minute they are not spending on their normal job tasks. The opportunity costs of disrupted business activities that technology issues cause are often much more than the resource costs of your service desk staff. Consider the impact on the revenue a salesperson is not generating or the products your manufacturing staff aren’t producing. Your service desk agents must understand how critical it is to keep your business processes running smoothly and enabling your employees to remain productive.
Consider the TCO for the company, not just support costs when making resource decisions
IT service desks are costly operations and, in most organizations, are considered overhead costs. IT leaders are constantly applying pressure to service desk management to reduce costs. While keeping costs reasonable and appropriate is important, it is essential that costs be considered in the context of TCO to the company, not just the direct costs of the service desk. A good example of this is the push towards self-service capabilities. In most cases (not all), your end users are higher-paid resources than your service desk staff. A common service desk activity is installing new computing equipment. Many companies are transitioning to self-service provisioning and installation as a means of cutting service-desk costs. What they are failing to realize is that not only are they shifting the activities to higher paid resources, but also they are incurring the opportunity costs of the end user's normal job tasks that aren’t being done, because the person is performing tasks that a service desk agent could be doing.
Make productive use of wait time by performing preliminary support tasks
Wait time does not need to be downtime. This is the ideal time to utilize self-service capabilities to collect data that the agent will need, perform diagnostics and enable users to browse FAQs to potentially resolve their own issues. Chat Bots, IVR systems, support questionnaires and automated-diagnostic capabilities can be integrated with your service desk tools to enable users to be productive in helping to resolve their support issues while they are waiting for an agent. In some cases, they may be able to resolve the issue entirely themselves, in other cases, they will be able to provide background information to accelerate ticket resolution. Both are better than time spent idle. If nothing else, then engaging users in support-related activities while they wait can distract them from the wait time itself and reduce frustration.
Dynamically allocate workload across support teams
In a typical service desk operation, not all teams are equally and constantly busy. By monitoring queue volumes and projected wait-times, peak workloads can often be distributed to other teams (or team members) enabling users to receive support faster. Your ITSM system can be configured to help. By using workflow-routing rules that span teams and queue-volume thresholds, wait times can be significantly reduced.
Train all your support staff to provide frontline support (even managers)
The biggest bottleneck in service desk operations is often in frontline support teams and the initial triage of new issues for impact, criticality, complexity and the need for specialized skillsets to resolve them. Fortunately, triaging issues isn’t a difficult skill to learn and with some basic training, anyone in your service organization can help. IT service desk best practices suggest that everyone in your service desk organization be trained as a frontline agent, even specialized support staff, and managers. If the normal frontline queues are overloaded, then underutilized resources should be empowered to help – minimizing wait-times for users should be a top priority.