5 Ways an Effective Service Desk Can Improve Customer Experience

* blog updated 7.22.21. 

Why is developing an effective service desk so important?

The service desk is the single point of contact that reflects on the IT department and entire business. Communication for all operational processes, from answering questions to resolving or escalating issues, goes through the service desk. Not only does it serve as a communication platform, it is also a critical factor in enhancing the productivity of your customers, while performing revenue-generating activities. As your System Center experts, we wanted to share insights on how to increase customers’ productivity while building an effective service desk team.

How do you maintain customer productivity?

Below are four quick ways your service desk can positively influence your business.

Resolve issues quickly. What are your response and resolution times? Do you have SLAs and metrics in place to monitor and enforce this? Increased resolution times allow customers to get back to their daily tasks sooner.

Create a positive customer experience. Take advance of each interaction between analysts and customers to create a pleasant experience. Build relationship and turn your customers into advocates where possible.

Leverage an omnichannel service strategy. Whether a customer is sitting at a desk, working remotely or standing at the service desk’s door, offer a seamless experience to your customers to request help.

Offer self-service. Enable your customers to help themselves by providing them with a knowledge base and self-service portal.

Serve your customers with an effective service desk

Looking to impress your customer base while keeping them as productive as possible while building your reputation? Focus on the steps below to build your effective service desk team:

1. As introduced in ITIL v3, improve service delivery by separating incidents from service requests. Is the customer experiencing an unplanned issue or requesting a service? As Incidents tend to be more urgent requests, they should be prioritized. Service requests, howevever, are often repetitive tasks that can be standardized and automated.
2. Proactively seek feedback from your customers to make sure you are meeting expectations. Sending out surveys is one approach to collecting feedback, although in my personal experience going beyond surveys and adding a personal touch results in higher response rates. Gather pain points, communicate corrective action steps being taken, implement changes and continuously repeat these steps.
   
   
3. Eliminate repetitive tasks and reoccurring issues. Analyze the data in your service desk ticketing system and determine which tasks make sense to automate and when to invest in this automation. What are your most frequent requests? How much will it cost to automate these requests? Like most organizations, is your most frequent service request related to password resets? In addition to fulfilling service requests themselves, you could leverage pre-populated templates for capturing information from your customers and implement workflows on the backend to reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks. When seeing repetitive issues pass through the service desks tiers, it is critical to document steps to resolution and share this knowledge with the team. Leverage this information to build your customer-facing knowledge base.
   
   
4. Invest in analysts’ skill sets and establish a clear promotion plan. In the service desk analyst role, individuals are tasked with resolving technology problems using their customer-relationship skills throughout the process. Technology is always changing, so it’s important to have knowledgeable staff in order to reduce resolution time and ticket volume. Training is a key component from both a technical and soft skills standpoint, involving communication, relationship-building, etc. Building these fundamental soft skills can result in enhanced customer experience. It also keeps your best talent motivated, as does a clear promotion and performance bonus plan.
   
   
5. Equip analysts with technology they need to be successful to standardize processes, improve service delivery time, automate processes and ensure they have satisfied customers.
   1. Provide answers faster with a consistent message using Knowledge Management technologies. Allow your analysts to develop a knowledge base with analysts-facing and customer-facing articles.
   2. Many services desks support customers in remote locations, so easy remote access to devices is critical. Provide your service desk team with a remote control tool.
   3. Implement a customer satisfaction survey for collecting feedback.
   4. Leverage a workflow analysis and automation tool to improve delivery.

Implement: Continuous Feedback, Improvements and Innovation

Be as proactive as possible in identifying and correcting service gaps. Schedule meetings with your most difficult customers to uncover major customer pain points and develop process improvements. Go beyond customer surveys and reach out to customers, like administrative assistants or project managers, to help measure customer satisfaction. These customers can translate into your biggest advocates! Designate a team to focus on continuous improvements to find the most cost-effective level of support and share your successes with your team.

Key Takeaways

In summary, develop a reputation for being effective and easy to work with via the service desk, as you provide  tools customers need to be successful and productive.

• Keep your customers productive: equip them with necessary tools to achieve productivity and flow
• Improve customer experience: design services that are pain-free, predictive, personalized and productive
• Implement automation solution: reduce costs and increase satisfaction/improve customer experience

Cireson solutions enable your service desk to be successful. From a service desk perspective, the Cireson Portal all allow your analysts to access their daily tasks from a browser so they’ll be able to fulfill their tasks remotely. We also offer a web-based Control Center, allowing for remote troubleshooting and rich data regarding a user or device.

Final thoughts:

• Build out the knowledge base for training purposes and provide a self-service option for customers to help themselves.
• Easily collect feedback from customers by including a link to a survey when an incident is resolved and be proactive about going beyond the survey.
• Post announcements for your customers when you have scheduled down time for various systems.
• Prioritize and categorize: determine your top requested services verses effort to automate and provide your customers with a beautiful service catalog where they can see the value of submitting requests with quicker results due to automation.

Is resetting passwords one of the top calls your service desk is receiving? Check out Cireson’s password reset solution that allows customers to reset their passwords from a browser or from the windows login screen. Our consultants have a wealth of experience building out service catalogs and automating processes. Please contact us for more information on our solutions, consulting services and methods to improve your customer experience with an effective service desk.