When we think of the impact of IT and digital transformation, we often don’t remember the significant impact that an outstanding service desk can have on a business’s operational, financial, and reputational outcomes.
So, I thought I’d put down the insights I have gathered over 20 years of managing service desks and the teams who run them, and what it takes to deliver an outstanding service.
Why is it crucial for businesses to get this piece of their IT plan right?
A consistent 24/7 service desk is essential for any business to function and be productive. We have worked with many clients to replace their service desk entirely or supplement their own in-house team to deliver an effective level of IT support to their business whenever it is needed. Having a trustworthy and reliable service desk is integral to maintain employee productivity and ensure a great employee experience. That’s why it’s crucial to get the fundamentals right and have your service desk run smoothly and efficiently.
What differentiates an outstanding Service Desk from an average one?
As well as the day-to-day IT management, businesses must be ready to adapt to rapidly changing technologies. An outstanding service desk team is always ready to deliver on this. With the sudden shift to remote working in 2020, our service desks teams faced fresh challenges to support our clients with shared network access, increased security threats and reliance on collaboration platforms.
In my experience, the differentiators can be summed up as six key factors: responsiveness, high first-time fixed rates, clear communication, great expectation management and maybe a less obvious one – empathy. Our service desk teams are trained to adapt to your working culture and understand what is important to your business driving increased customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is crucial to our service desk performance and we track this using the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Can you explain the Net Promoter Score®?
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer experience and satisfaction by asking customers how likely they are to recommend your service to others. This global metric provides the core measurement for customer experience and here at Transputec we take our scores very seriously. For the Financial Year 2020/21, we have a monthly average NPS of 71 which by NPS grades is, well, outstanding. We are fanatical about providing customer satisfaction throughout our business and this is especially important to our service desk teams.
What skill set does an outstanding service desk operator need?
We pride ourselves on the technical competence of all our service desk team. We also train our experts to always look at the big picture and to take a business-first approach. Our service desk team may be physically remote, but it is important they are integral to your in-house team so they can respond quickly and effectively.
From creating networks, facilitating access to shared directories to supporting printers and resolving software glitches, a good service desk operator needs agile problem-solving skills and the ability to multitask.
Our service desk team has not just a wealth of technical skills but also bring skills that embody our customer first values at Transputec; a can-do attitude, the ambition to exceed customer expectations, and deliver on speed of response.
Good management is also vital and we are proud of our award winning Service Desk and Support Manager, Anca Otet, who recently won Manager of the Year at the CRN Women in Channel Awards.
What has been the impact of remote working on in house IT support teams?
Covid-19 and the shift to remote working has made an outstanding service desk essential rather than nice to have. As our survey shows, more than half of UK businesses are planning to increase spending on digital skills training. As the demands of the remote worker vary according to each employee, service desk teams need to be able to support different working pattens and an increasingly wider range of demands from the end user. Security issues have also been critical to resolve – having the right end point protection and security management tools is something that our service desk teams have been busy working on for all our clients.
It’s vital that any business addresses all their employees’ remote working needs as something seemingly small could have an adverse effect long-term. Failing to invest in an effective 24/7 service desk means you will not be providing essential IT support to your employees and your business.
If you’re frustrated by the performance of your current service desk, get in touch to discuss how we can help support your business with our outstanding service desk service.
Stuart Salt
Services Director