• November 18, 2020
  • by Varun Sharma

Implementing a Successful IT Service Desk Strategy

Implementing a Successful IT Service Desk Strategy – Featured Image

The IT service desk is the traditional catch-all for technology problems. A good one solves problems quickly and consistently with minimal interruptions. The problem is that an excellent service desk is hard to find.

Many organizations lack an IT service desk strategy that embraces continuous improvement. Service desks must evolve to keep up with fast-moving IT service management (ITSM) practices. Those that do consistently innovate have the potential to enhance the entire IT environment with sophisticated service workflows. A great IT service desk is a platform for a full-featured ITSM strategy.

Here are the top five tips for implementing a successful IT service desk strategy.

#1: Create a Clear Technology Roadmap

Your infrastructure can make or break the ITSM workflows on which your . A well-planned set of tools will boost productivity by creating a seamless and intuitive user experience. For example, a should include the following components:

  • Automation: identifying problems, receiving incoming requests, or rerouting common inquiries to a knowledge base.
  • Collaboration: shared inboxes to streamline incoming requests with the ability to categorize, prioritize, and assign to the right team members.
  • Integration: ticketing is just one component of your ITSM framework, so it needs to integrate easily with your other applications to share client knowledge with other departments.
  • Self-service: a self-service portal can increase productivity for your team and your client, allowing easy access to information so that users can help themselves.
  • Reporting: to improve, you need the ability to track performance by way of response times, volume, and customer satisfaction.
  • Feedback: Collecting team and user feedback within the tool an important feature that service desks often overlook. Automating it supports agile development.

While important, tools alone are not enough. Your strategy should also consider the organization’s short and long-term needs in areas such as service automation and accessibility, especially as most people continue to work from home.

#2: Plan for Scalability

Capacity and scalability planning can be a time-consuming and manual task, hampering productivity and increasing your risk of manual errors or over-spending on resources. As your organization grows, it’s important to ensure that you have enough IT service desk resources to continue hitting your performance targets and maintaining customer satisfaction. That takes astute planning for hardware, software, and personnel.

Evaluate your current capacity and explore how usage has grown over time. Do you have enough resources to support your scalability needs? How much do you expect your IT service usage to grow, especially when you add more service capabilities to your existing ones? Do you have reporting tools that provide the specific insights and metrics required for capacity and scalability planning?

Are you in the process of evaluating your current service desk solution? Download our convenient self-assessment questionnaire spreadsheet.[hubspot_CTA id=”1c0b1780-e206-425e-bd24-35e57a3b9292″]

#3: Take One Step at a Time

When ramping up an ITSM strategy and building change management within an organization, there are critical aspects that need to be considered, such as:

  • Are your current tools robust enough to support the needs of your organization and clients? Or are there functions missing that could increase client engagement and improve employee productivity?
  • Are you using agile development, DevOps, or both to continuously improve or pivot systems based on user feedback?

#4: Listen to Employee Feedback

Solicit and use employee feedback on the successes and challenges of your IT service desk strategy, especially when trying new things. An automated feedback component in your ticketing system or other tools can help collect user opinions. This feedback, along with meaningful metrics, can inspire innovation and future enhancements across your organization and help you to more deeply understand current and future needs.

Long-term change management depends on employees using new features and systems. To see the ROI on new ITSM efforts, users must adopt those features at scale. Using canary releases to collect feedback before rolling out updates to the entire organization will lower your risk of lost productivity and encourage quicker adoption of new features over time.

Building an ITSM strategy without considering feedback risks static service delivery, frustrated end-users, and unhappy clients.

#5: Prepare for Continuous Improvement

This user feedback is an integral part of our fifth IT service desk success factor: continuous improvement. This is crucial when keeping your service desk’s operation aligned with business goals Continue to ask what is working well, what needs changing, and where you can take things next.

User feedback is only part of the continuous improvement process. The other is measurable metrics that you can evaluate against specific, measurable goals. These metrics include performance data such as the number of incidents, lost productivity, service request volumes, and response times. The bigger challenge involves putting those metrics in context, bringing meaning to them and gaining new insights into the end-user experience.

Taking The Next Step

The service desk is one of the few entities that operates across internal divisions and workstreams. This gives it the potential to foster change and promote continuous improvement. A formidable IT service desk strategy focuses on ITIL’s four dimensions: people, process, technology, and partnership, with an effective feedback loop and development methodology to support it.

Building a strategy that encompasses all these things takes expertise in aligning business and technology values. If you’re ready to take the next step in your service desk journey, talk to WBM’s Enterprise Service Desk team.

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Varun Sharma

Varun Sharma

As one of WBM’s Subject Matter Experts in Service Desk delivery and execution, Varun Sharma has over a decade of experience in delivering exceptional results-driven customer satisfaction. Varun thrives in the analysis of numbers, data, and information. However, he is best known for his passion about continuous improvement, his determination in finding efficiencies to help make his teams successful, and his dedication to his team, partners, and co-workers.

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