Eliminating Service Desk Challenges

Over the past years, after working closely with the Service Desk, it became evident that their functionality can be vastly improved to provide a better service experience. Whether it’s a large organization that counts with a large call center with 500+ people or whether it’s a small organization that counts with 5-20 support staff, the challenges tend to be similar.

Grasping clustered information

One of the biggest challenges they face is the access to information and time spent solving a problem. The information is more than likely clustered across many different solutions, tools and knowledge bases.  Where this gets interesting, is in what tools they have in their disposal, because if and when a problem arises, the person handling the case will need to take a look into a couple of different systems just to understand what the level of impact is.

When a call about a service disruption comes in, typically they still won’t have instantly information available. The Service Desk agent will then have to look into all these solutions to understand what the end user is experiencing.

To expand a bit on that, the Service Desk is no longer viewed as a contact point for ad hoc requests by phone, email or chat, coordinating, solving and escalating incidents. The expectation is that the Service Desk proactively takes part in not only incident, but problem & change management, and overall service improvement.

Looking at the big picture

The preferred model should be a Service Desk function which is an integral part of IT Service Management (ITSM). In order for the Service Desk to be effective in adding value to above processes, they need to have a view on what is happening in the supported IT infrastructure in relation to those processes.

One way to improve the situation is to choose tools that have intelligence built into them.

What does that mean then?

For example, a Service Desk could have an ITSM solution to store all the information on assets that they support. Into which they will record incidents, problems and changes that are related to those assets. The information on how those assets are related is mapped in their CMDB.

In order to provide an actual resolution to the end user contacting the desk, they would have to use one or multiple monitoring software solutions and management software as well. In a typical scenario, they will have to use at least three different tools/solutions to understand the situation: a ticketing tool with CMDB, a management solution and/or a monitoring solution. That’s already three different solutions to troubleshoot, understand the performance of the service and which IT services it’s related to.

To improve the situation the Service Agent needs a real-time dashboard view into the infrastructure for the services that they support. This comes as a challenge when there are several monitoring and management solutions in place. It can become an exercise that can be comparable to searching for a post you saw, but can’t remember in which social media platform you saw it. You’ll have to take a peek at all the social media platforms you use: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., before determining what it was you wanted to share.

This is the part where Savision can step in to enable the Service Desk of any organization to deliver more value to the end users and infrastructure teams. We can consolidate data from several monitoring and ITSM tools into one view, with the possibility to drill down into the root cause of the service disruption.

This approach will allow your management and Service Desk to have a holistic view of your IT infrastructure and keep your stakeholders well informed about the status of services. It will streamline how information flows throughout your organization.

Hopefully this provided something new for you to chew on, and will help understand the importance of your Service Desk and how it provides value to the organization if they have the right tools and resources available.