Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Integrating Multiple Service Desks within the Same Organization
If there are a hundred ways to get customer support and technical support right, there are a million ways to get them wrong. With communications changing rapidly – new media channels such as mobile app and social media being added – organizations are under a great deal of pressure to build a great customer experience. But it’s easy to forget that not all support workers are there to help outside customers. Service desks, for example, exist to meet the in-house IT needs of company employees. As anyone who has ever used an in-house company service desk knows, the process doesn’t always go smoothly.
Wolter Smit, writing for EnterpriseAppsTech, recently highlighted a Service Desk Institute query into how organizations have their service desks set up. As it turns out, more than 90 percent of the questioned organizations have more than one service desk. This has a tendency to complicate service queries and leads to confusion on the part of employees, mistakes and duplicate work.
“This often goes well for most, but it is not uncommon for someone to end up at the wrong service desk,” wrote Smit. “The numbers back this up: 55 percent of organizations report that between three percent and 12 percent of their employees go to the wrong desk. For seven percent of organizations, this number even exceeds 12 percent.”
Service desks often grow organically from an individual to a group of people who may service every department in the company. Often, the way they grow doesn’t make a lot of sense: silos exist in which certain service desk personnel handle one department, and a different group handles another. The two desks don’t communicate, so they wind up reinventing the wheel on a regular basis, or undoing one another’s work. Smit noted that many organizations are actually wary of closer collaboration between supporting departments.
The obstacles are many: there’s the “we’ve always done it this way” fear of change. There are also cultural di?erences, politics and different ways of working, not to mention technology limitations. The task of merging multiple service steps into a single entity will be a multi-step process, wrote Smith. Throwing out the old processes entirely may not be the best way to solve the problem. He suggests that companies start small.
“A possible ?rst step towards a shared service desk is setting up a shared digital portal where people can send in requests and view service information,” he wrote. “This makes it easier for your colleagues to ?nd what they need. A relatively easy next step is to bring together the various desks’ front offices in a single space.”
Through a shared portal, employees and service workers can get to know one another better – across departments and functions – and different service desk resources are better positioned to share knowledge and collaborate.
“Things that are not going smoothly and a?ect both service desks are often easily improved through better coordination or set ups,” wrote Smith. “This does not all need to be done at once; just start with what’s most bothersome.”
Edited by Alicia Young