Solution Areas
Modernising Service Desk Solutions
Evolve your Service Desk to meet new ways of working
Your company’s IT service desk is the single point of contact lodging for requests and incidents. However, with new ways of working now almost completely digital, teams have adopted an even greater reliance on technology that works reliably and consistently, no matter where they are.
Due to the ‘unprecedented’ surge in customer enquiries, cancellations, and other issues brought on by the pandemic — many businesses have had to look within, to source a pragmatic solution to support teams.
Traditionally, service desks have been keeping up with increasing demands of the business by simply optimising the ways they work – usually by making incremental changes in several areas, when and if time permits. But what if an alternate solution existed?
Many Australian companies and their customers have turned to chatbots and online messaging channels, with the last year alone delivering a near six-fold (5.6x) increase in Australians using chatbots via messaging channels such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and SMS to communicate with brands.
With a rapidly changing environment, companies who have adapted and introduced new solutions to manage the increased demand on support services have also experienced positive outcomes in terms of employee engagement and enjoyment across the business. Great customer support has been cited as the main driver for internal customer satisfaction for ALL of the IT function, according to a survey of over 1,000 global large cap companies1.
It is prudent, given the omni-channel nature of delivering services to multi-function, multi-location, multi-device internal IT users that significant consideration is given to Service Desk and Contact Centre right-sizing, near-shoring and predicting trends towards bringing services back onshore to meet evolving ANZ market demands.
Savvy employers and innovators are realising that productivity gains and employee satisfaction are dependent on a modern, user-centred product and service delivered by their service desk.
These same employers are listening to their teams who are comparing their work service desk to how services over the web are provided to them in their personal lives, and asking ‘why can’t we have this capability at work?’
If your service desk hasn’t radically, permanently changed how it provides support to your team during COVID-19, you are most probably running an obsolete, out-of-date service.
Modernising your service desk will allow you to lower your cost of service and keep your internal IT users working – productively and engaged.
CDRU advocates and consults to organisations to examine the whole of the IT Service Desk and End User Service offering to service both internal employees but also ensuring external team and customers benefit from the entire service offering.
Transform rather than optimise your service desk and support services
The three traditional pillars of developing your product and services are geared towards only optimising a service:
- Systems thinking,
- Amplifying feedback loops,
- Continual experimentation and learning.
The aim must be to modernise and deliver transformative change.
“Customer expectations are far exceeding what you can really do….that means a fundamental rethink about what we do with technology in organisations.”
George Westerman
MIT principal research scientist and author of Leading Digital: Turning Technology Into Business Transformation
Service desk transformation starts with redefining the role of your team
This redefinition must also extend to the agreements in place with any and all of your external service providers that contribute to the internal IT user experience.
It is widely accepted that how well a business treats its employees, and how organisational leadership contribute to their employees well-being and enjoyment in the workplace, directly correlates with better business outcomes. By repositioning your employees as (internal) customers and treating them as equally important as your external customers leads to individuals and teams going above and beyond in their work.
When assessing current state and scoping a modernised service desk solution that puts your team performance at it’s core, innovation, technology initiatives and digitised workflows can deliver vastly improved experience, efficiency and productivity. For example:
Knowledge management: providing relevant, tailored information that users can easily find using self-help to solve problems faster.
Omnichannel self-service: having multiple ways (on an array of devices) your (internal) customer can access the information they need.
Intelligent Automation: leverage the automation tools that work for your organisation and drive efficiencies.
A/I Augmentation: using tools to enhance and provide a personalised experience to your (internal) customers to solve problems faster.
The Bottom Line: Fixing problems first time and faster means:
- Liberation of service desk teams from mundane daily tasks to focus on serving customers better
- Lower run costs using multiple lower cost channels; and
- Less downtime for your team.
CDRU’s framework to a smooth service desk transformation
With so many options, modernising your service desk can be technically, operationally, and financially challenging – if not well managed. CDRU has a tested approach that delivers outstanding business outcomes, every time.
The CDRU process includes:
- Strategy – Redesigning the service desk operating model to meet your specific business and customer needs.
- Architecture – Architectural redesign to support the new operating model.
- Sourcing – Running sourcing activities, to support new strategy and architecture.
- Commercial – Negotiating new agreements and renegotiating existing agreements to deliver best in class rates.
- Service Levels – Setting metrics and SLAs that align behaviours to performance with flexibility to adapt to a changing environment.
Meet your teams expectations and deliver an outstanding service experience
“The future service desk should more closely align with the consumer experience in terms of self-service and the availability of applicable information.”
David Slavkin
Service desk manager, Gensler
CDRU will work collaboratively with your business to develop a solid organisational vision, aligned technology strategy, and a business engagement plan to ensure a smooth and successful transformation of your service desk.
Under CDRU’s methodology, your new service desk will:
- Meet the increasing demands of an enhanced user experience.
- Give your users more ways to solve their problems 24 x 7.
- Ensure your service better aligns with your business requirements and expectations.
- Distribute workload to the best-qualified service agents to increase a ‘fix on first call’ outcome.
- Release your teams bandwidth to manage, not react to your business.
In the Australian energy sector, a client faced increased activity levels that suddenly uncovered their service desk limitations
Following a previous activity focused on removing costs from an outsourced service desk provider, the service offering was not meeting internal user expectations and under-delivering business value.
With several transformation projects concurrently underway, COVID remote working as standard, and a policy that prohibited BYOD devices, the number of users and devices significantly increased and is predicted to do so for several years.
- The service desk was running at capacity.
- The SaaS help desk platform was not being used as intended.
- Teams were unable to update their knowledge base systems, complete incident investigations and problem management within proscribed timeframes.
The challenge:
To modernise the service desk and provide a better user experience without significant cost increases.
- Change the focus to view and treat internal users as customers
- Lower the cost-to-serve and introduce appropriate automation solutions to meet increased productivity and efficiency metrics
The solution:
CDRUs extensive market knowledge and experience enabled a thorough analysis and assessment process which resulted in the recommendation of a contemporary outcomes-based solution that met the modernisation needs for the IT service desk business transformation.
- Allowed the potential service providers to select tools that best delivered the business outcomes, rather than building in costs by excessively specifying the tools required.
- Potential service providers competed not on price (fixed price ceiling) but on specifying and delivering the most relevant end-to-end business outcomes.
- Provided A/I and user experience tools including persona-based services to provide a personalised service desk experience.
- Self-healing automation for client devices.
- Reporting tools and analytics that mapped out processes and documentation candidates for future automation.
The outcome:
With the extra capabilities and tools added to the service offering, the service desk have reduced their operational costs by a further 8% per annum and is on track to deliver a 20% reduction in trouble ticket volumes by deflecting to lower cost to service channels.
The introduction of six additional (internal) user experience metrics track the efficiency of resolving problems but also the employee’s satisfaction and perception of the service, so the business and the service provider maintain a sharp focus on having satisfied internal customers.
And the business outcomes? – the productivity gains defer increases to the OPEX budget for four years, despite the forecasted increase in smart devices/users. The changes have given the business and technology team bandwidth to focus on business growth, not on how to keep the service desk running.
The CDRU baselining and benchmarking phases typically identify that organisations lack time, focus, capabilities and talent to manage both their IT service desk and keep pace with emerging technologies.
Not only does CDRU bring focus and expertise in transforming your service desk, CDRU also enable clients to access relevant innovation to accelerate transformation and service improvements.
Explore how CDRU can support your immediate and long-term transformation goals
CDRU delivers operational cost and value optimisation outcomes at speed, and have influenced over $30 BN total spend since 2017, in 200+ engagements across 90+ enterprise and public sector clients.
Discover how CDRU can accelerate your service desk modernisation initiatives. Get in Touch today.
1. Jeff Rumberg, Zen of Service desk support, MetricNet.