The Best ITIL Service Desk for your Customers
The Service Desk is the Nerve-Center for support, which plays a critical role in ensuring reliability, availability and continuity of IT services rather than just logging and resolving end-user issues. Our Service Desk operations are delivered through a consistent set of tools and processes providing efficient and cost effective IT Services to our customers.
Our Service Desk acts as one single entity instead of silos. This provides a single handle, in terms of control, to our customers and also leads to significant efficiency and effectiveness.
Service Desk ITIL
Following are our service components in IT Service Desk:
•Self Help – An enterprise wide web portal with an enriched and updated back-end of knowledge base of most common issues faced by users that enables users to resolve an incident, create a request, report an incident and review the status of submitted requests etc.
•First & Second Level Support – Provide support for logging, tracking, Resolution and reporting of help desk incidents and service requests. The activities associated with restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible and to minimize the adverse impact on business operations, thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained.
•Third level Support – These individuals are experts in their fields and are responsible for not only assisting both Tier I and Tier II personnel, but with the research and development of solutions to new or unknown issues. Tier III technicians have the same responsibility as Tier II technicians in reviewing the work order and assessing the time already spent with the customer so that the work is prioritized and time management is sufficiently utilized.
The Service Desk is concerned with the overall IT process and the individual components that function and interact with each other on both a software and process level. One area that is a must in any IT service offering is the ability to manage specific end user problems and issues. Thus, a Service Desk either has to have Help Desk functionality embedded in their Service Desk infrastructure or has the ability to link into a Help Desk offering for the end user. The Service Desk is focused on the service strategy and ensuring all the IT functions are currently working and will work in the future, they must also have the ability to ensure all end users up and functioning.
Availability. Are you available when your customers need you the most? Do you at least call/email them back within a timely manner? Good customer service means being there for your customers.
Human-ness. Do customers have to answer 10 questions from a machine before getting to speak with you? It’s okay to have one or two qualifying questions, but don’t make your customers answer 5 minutes of questions before they can speak with you.
Efficiency. Your customer service reps must be efficient and able to solve issues the first time, and in a short amount of time. When you’re customers are done, they should think,”Wow! That was so much easier than I expected.”
Honesty. In some recent blogs, I talked about how important trust is. You customers need to be able to trust you and your business practices in order to be comfortable with you.
Personality. Sure, you can provide all of the above, but you need to have personality. Make it an experience, not a transaction.
When done with ITIL v3 standards, the Service Desk will be the Single Point of Contact (SPOC) and route the call to the appropriate location for resolution. The Service Desk owns the call and will follow it through to ensure the customer who called in the problem is satisfied with the resolution. Having this SPOC and ownership of the call enables:
Higher end-user customer satisfaction – The Service Desk is keeping the end-user well informed.
Increased end-user productivity – The Service Desk is tracking the problem, enabling the end-user to continue with their daily work.
Better cost control – The Service Desk ensures the call is being routed to the appropriate center within the company to be resolved.
The Service Desk also monitors all processes and trends. When the Service Desk notices problems within the processes or worrisome trends, they make adjustments to fix the problem before it is detected by the end-users.
A Service Desk is a Single Point of Contact between users and IT Service Management. It manages information delivery by utilizing Information IT infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3 best practices to deliver these services both with software and defined processes. The Service Desk is the first contact in an organization for any and all IT questions. Best practices Service Desks are process focused and company strategy focused. The processes outlined in ITIL v3 are broken down into five ITIL Core Service Lifecycles.
Service Strategy –Evaluate current services and ensure a plan is in place to, modify and implement new and existing services when required.
Service Design – Evaluate and ensure a new service will meet current and future needs. Ensure a new service can be introduced into the live environment.
Service Transition – Define a plan that ensures no service outages or gaps during a service transition, thus the effects of the transition on the corporation are minimal.
Service Operation – Responsible for the ongoing monitoring of a service that is used to deliver services.
Continual Service Improvement – Review and analyze opportunities to improve all IT process and functions.
In ITIL v3 a Help Desk is a component of a Service Desk
A Help Desk with ITIL v3 best practices, is one component of the overall service management and will feed information to a Service Desk through software and process hooks. Specifically, the functions outlined in the Service Operations section of the ITIL core service lifecycles are Help Desk functions. These functions include:
Event Management
Incident Management
Request Management
Problem Management
Access Management
These are not the only functions that a best practice Help Desk performs. There are more Help Desk functions embedded in the other 4 segments of the lifecycle management (Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition and Continual Service Improvement). For example, the Help Desk needs to be involved with any type of service transition to ensure the new service does not adversely affect the end users
Providing a balance between technology and the human touch. We stand ready to aid you quickly, cost effectively, and with the technical expertise that is demanded in today’s ever increasing complex IT infrastructures and customer-facing solutions. Go ITIL Service Desk, you are the best!
Mr. MakingUsmile
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