It’s all about customer service. Today’s
expectation of IT organizations is that
customer support will be friendlier, faster and more thorough, with the technology available to restore service quickly
to prevent loss of productivity.
“The focus should be on what the customers’ needs are and ensuring that you
have the knowledge and right tool sets for
supporting them,” says Sandy Barr, ITIL,
Service Center Manager for Houston-based DYONYX. “When the IT organization has a solid understanding of the customers’ needs and they work together to
define their service levels, this develops a
strong relationship and creates actual,
documented measurements of success.”
Smart Business talked with Barr for further insight into a well-run service desk
and how this impacts overall operations.
Why is new technology alone not the answer
to improved productivity?
New technology is inevitable and does
provide efficiencies that we didn’t have
20 years ago, but along with new technology comes new support issues. New technologies may give us an edge and/or provide us with direct, constant communication, allowing us to quickly respond to
customers, co-workers or other key people. Technology does fail from time to
time. Having a professional and highly
skilled service desk up to speed with
such technologies can alleviate loss of
productivity by restoring service immediately. Training your service desk staff
members and keeping them on the technology fast-track is key. The more knowledge they have, the quicker, better, more
accurate service is provided to the customer. In addition, the service desk, while
providing restoration of service, can educate the customers to empower them
with the knowledge, as well.
How do you reduce costs?
Providing a single point of contact for
first-call resolution is a good start. By
streamlining support staff and arming
your service desk with today’s technological resources, such as remote control capability, software distribution and a
robust ticketing and asset management
system with a dynamic knowledge base,
the ‘single point of contact’ takes on a
whole new meaning. Within this environment, you suddenly realize that your more
technical resources that typically get
tapped for assistance are now able to
focus on true problem management and
root cause analysis. With a strong service
desk, you’re building the most valuable
information repository for your organization. You’re able to identify, track and document known issues and their resolutions. This increases the first-call resolution rate of the service desk and, if made
available to the customers, allows them to
diagnose their own issues and lessen the
call volume, thus reducing costs and
decreasing downtime.
How do you avoid the challenges with the
battle of ‘business versus IT’?
Keeping the business and IT organization in sync requires frequent communication regarding the company’s standards
for desktop hardware, software and PDAs
or other devices. The IT organization has
a responsibility to keep the standards current with technology and not only identify
where there is business justification for
change but also that the technology has
been thoroughly tested and will not cause
a drop in productivity. It is the responsibility of the IT organization to educate the
business users for proper synergy. The
key is in the promotion of the culture from
the top level down to promote acceptance
of standards without the organization
feeling as if the standards have been mandated without business consideration.
Another key factor is to ensure that the
IT organization is not just a nameless,
faceless voice on the phone. It’s important
to rotate support roles so that the business users can always put a name with a
face. This helps to promote comfort and
familiarity and develops strong relationships and trust with the IT organization.
While the trend over the years to reduce
costs has been to offshore support to
India or China, that strategy has not
proven to be a true ‘service-minded’
approach. Providing a higher quality of
support with a stronger focus on customer service is preferable.
What is ITIL and is it the best standards-based approach?
ITIL stands for information technology
infrastructure library, developed in the
late 1980s in the U.K. Before ITIL, IT
organizations were more internally concentrated on technical issues and less on
providing quality service and developing
customer relations. ITIL provides the
framework for IT organizations with a
methodology that will enable them to
align their focus on service delivery and
service support. There are basically three
levels for a central point of contact. They
are a call center, a help desk and a service
desk. The natural evolution for most call
centers and help desks is to become a
service desk that allows business processes to be integrated into the service management organization.
SANDY BARR, ITIL, is Service Center Manager for Houston-based DYONYX. Reach her at (713) 293-6322 or [email protected].