Your Service Desk Should Not Just Act As an Answering Service?
The IT support has been expanding at a rapid rate and there is abundant cheap service desk solution available in the market. The major issue is when companies contemplate outsourcing their service desk operations. These businesses frequently look at the solution as an extra expense rather than a chance to minimize their internal IT expenses. Although minimal problem resolution undertaken at Level 1 is undoubtedly the most defining and penetrating trait of an answering log or service, here are some of the other tell-tale symptoms that your service desk could be operating only as an answering service:
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No queue management, analysis for ticket aging or follow-up done
If your business follows an answering or route and log service model, there is a tendency for your service desk to examine too quickly, abdicate and escalate resolution ownership with the application of minimal effort. In case a business is following the log and route service model, there is no follow-up done with the end-users for tickets, which are open a service desk for a long time. This may happen because an agent is doing research on that issue or heir shift could have got over. When your service desk is truly managed, it will be manned by dedicated employees who review the queue to check for open tickets, asks agents to take speedy actions, or reallocate the ticket as well as generate and check aging reports to check for bottlenecks if any in the workflow of ticket resolution.
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Very little client specific training
As far as it is a matter of training agents on supported accounts is concerned, a log and route tike solution can hardly offer much pre-implementation training except for informing about the groups that get the escalated tickets and ways of using the ticketing system. Team Leads and CRM should ideally review the documentation as well as create tailored training materials during the implementation process. Such training materials should be designed while collaborating with the IT staff of the clients to capture any extra knowledge required. Whenever, a client deploys new tools, operating systems, and new applications into their constantly changing IT environment, an outsourced service desk will absorb those expenses as it in the best interest of their business to get used to the growing support needs of their clients.
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There is hardly any kind of knowledge management
When a ticket that should be remotely resolvable gets escalated frequently, it should be documented properly and get incorporated in the resolution report of the service desk team. Such troubleshooting steps should be recorded in the knowledge base so that they can be accessed as and when needed. Any proactive and diligent service desk does root cause analysis on a regular basis for problem management and recurring issues to minimize or eliminate their occurrence in the future.
- Account management is negligible or nil
In case your service desk is simply offering the bodies but leaving the entire guidance part to the IT department of the end client, it is not a great outsourced service. When leadership is absent at the helm of your service desk, it becomes absolutely essential for the IT management team at the client end to offer remedial actions and guidance to the agent directly.
