Whether your business is mature or starting up; rapidly growing or keeping steady, it will experience technical change to some degree. These changes might be in ongoing process or short-term problem solving, but to manage them you’ll need some level of service desk. To get it right, and benefit a business, it’s important to understand what a service desk is and which features may be key for your organisation.
What is a Service Desk?
Within your business, your service desk is the point of contact between the service provider and the users. It is here that customers, or users, can find help from their IT service providers. A service desk may include elements of a help desk, which is there to respond to immediate issues and problems. However, the service desk overall must meet the needs of the business. For this reason, their work is strategic and focussed on refining and implementing processes that will benefit a business performance.
Key Benefits of a Service Desk
Since the purpose of a service desk is to support the business and its IT performance, it follows that having a service desk can only benefit a business. So which ways do we see these benefits manifesting?
Cost Saving
External IT service desk providers allow businesses to avoid salaried employees performing this role. Similarly, service desk software prevents lengthy periods of IT change or issues impacting on business productivity.
Scalability
As a growing business, the requirements of your service desk may change rapidly. When you implement the right service desk software, your service procedures can perform flexibly to grow with the business.
Efficiency
By centralising your IT support and processes, this side of your operations should perform more efficiently. The integral role that technology plays in modern business means that this efficiency often drips through to the rest of the organisation.
Support
Your service desk allows all sides of the business to feel supported and be able to access support whenever they need it. This element of the organisation is there to serve the business, so speed and performance is key.
Productivity
A productive service desk means a productive organisation. When so many businesses rely on their IT systems to perform, department productivity can be directly influenced by your service desk products and features.
Service Desk Best Practice
If the performance of your service desk is so important, then, what are the best practice guidelines to ensure that your service desk is performing?
Optimise software potential
Service desk software can often be utilised more fully than it is. With this in mind, make sure that your business makes use of the features that make a difference. This changes for each business, which is why it’s so critical to choose the right product and supplier for your business.
Specialise your teams
Gone are the days when IT was one all-encompassing field. From incident resolution to strategic development to network maintenance, identify your service desk teams. By allowing teams to be focussed, they will be better equipped to work productively and the business always benefits.
Utilise portals
Portals make your service desk processes more streamlined and facilitate communication in an intuitive way. The benefits here are felt by different departments whose individual priorities can be reflected through portals.
Promote self service
A key way that portals are great practice within your service desk is how they enable self-service with greater clarity. Additionally, features such as FAQ management and document libraries can be added to optimise your self-service offering. This empowers customers and users all whilst easing workflow.
Understanding SLAs
The performance of a service desk is normally evaluated through Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Setting and monitoring these should be part of your service desk itself. Service desk systems should enable managers to set SLAs that are relevant to their teams, rather than based on arbitrary data.
Progress
The Role of KPIs allow businesses to assess their progress in terms of business objectives. From a service desk perspective, these indicators should provide substance to the teams who need to manifest larger strategic goals. In this way, these performance indicators help to prioritise incidents and continually assess how the business is performing.
Priorities
At the root of the service desk is the fact that it must support the aims of the business to an agreed standard. The business is the customer which should be provided with an effective service. This highlights quality and continuity of service and performance. So, your service desk produced SLAs allow your technology and business to meet priorities with more clarity.
Conclusion
The majority of UK business relies on efficient IT to perform productively, so it’s clear that a service desk is instrumental in support between business and technology. The key decisions for individual organisations lie in selecting the correct features for your service desk. With the right tools implemented, IT and business combine to build successful and growing organisations.