5 Steps to Improving Customer Experience with an Effective Service Desk

Why is developing an effective service desk so important?

The service desk is the single point of contact whose reputation from the business is reflected upon the entire IT department. Communication for all operational processes, from answering questions to resolving or escalating issues, goes through the service desk. Not only do they serve as a communication platform, they also are a critical factor in enhancing the productivity of your customers while performing revenue-generating activities. As your Sytem Center experts, this article describes ways of increasing your customers’ productivity while building an effective service desk team.

How do you keep your customers productive?

Keeping your internal and/or external customers productive is reflected in the success of the business. Below are four quick ways your service desk can positively influence this.

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

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, on the go, 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 serve themselves by providing them with a knowledge base and self-service portal.

Impress your customers with an effective service desk

Looking to really impress your customer base while keeping them as productive as possible and 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, the service desk should focus on resolving these quickly as possible based on priority. Service requests can be fulfilled by individuals outside the service desk and often times are repetitive tasks that can be standardized and automated.
2. Proactively seek feedback from your customers to ensure you’re providing services that meets their requirements. Sending out surveys is one approach to collecting feedback, although going beyond surveys and adding that personal touch results in higher response rates from my personal experience. Gather their pain points, inform them you are taking corrective changes, implement these changes, and then 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 prepopulated 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 sharing this knowledge with the team. Leverage this information to build your customer facing knowledge base.
4. Invest in your analysts’ skill set 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. As technology is always changing and it’s important to have knowledgeable staff in order to reduce the resolution time and essentially ticket volume, training is a key component from both a technical standpoint and soft skills training on communication, relationship-building, etc. Building these fundamental soft skills can result in enhanced customer experience. Another key factor is establishing a clear promotion and performance bonus plan with your analysts to keep your best talent excited and motivated.
5. Equip your analysts with the technology they need to be successful to standardize processes, improve service delivery time, automate processes, and ensure they have satisfied customers.
   1. Prove answers faster with a consistent message using Knowledge Management technologies. Allow your analysts to develop a knowledge base with both analysts facing and customer facing articles.
   2. As many services desks support customers in remote locations, easy remote access to their 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 ensure you are providing a service to your customers that meets their needs in terms of how you are providing the service and which channels you are providing the service through.

Continuous Feedback, Improvements and Innovation

Be as proactive as possible in identifying and correcting service gaps. Schedule meetings with your most difficult customers to not only uncover major customer pain points, but also to develop process improvements with. Go beyond customer surveys to reach out to customers such as administrative assistants or project managers to help measure customer satisfaction. Often times these customers can translate to your biggest advocates! Designate a team to focus on continuous improvements to find the most cost-effective level of support and be sure to share your successes with your team.

Key Takeaways

In summary, develop an effective and easy to work with reputation with your customers via the service desk as you provide them with the tools they need to be successful and stay 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. They can also build out the knowledge base for training purposes and to provide a self-service option for their customers to enable them to help themselves. Easily collect feedback from your 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. Determine your top requested services verses the amount of effort it takes to automate them 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 our password reset solution that allows your 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 ways to improve your customer experience with an effective service desk.

The post 5 Steps to Improving Customer Experience with an Effective Service Desk appeared first on Cireson.