Standardize the Service Desk

Improve customer service by driving consistency in your support approach and meeting SLAs.

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Contributors

Jason Aqui, IT Director, Bellevue College
Kevin Sigil, IT Director, Southwest Care Centre
Lucas Gutierrez, Service Desk Manager, City of Santa Fe
Rama Dhuwaraha, CIO, University of North Texas System
Annelie Rugg, CIO, UCLA Humanities
Owen McKeith, Manager IT Infrastructure, Canpotex
Rod Gula, IT Director, American Realty Association
Rosalba Trujillo, Service Desk Manager, Northgate Markets
Jason Metcalfe, IT Manager, Mesalabs
Bradley Rodgers, IT Manager, SecureTek
Daun Costa, IT Manager, Pita Pit
Kari Petty, Service Desk Manager, Mansfield Oil
Denis Borka, Service Desk Manager, PennTex Midstream
Lateef Ashekun, IT Manager, City of Atlanta
Ted Zeisner, IT Manager, University of Ottawa Institut de Cardiologie

Not everyone embraces their role in service support. Specialists would rather work on projects than provide service support.
The Service Desk lacks processes and workflows to provide consistent service. Service desk managers struggle to set and meet service-level expectations, which further compromises end-user satisfaction.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Service desk improvement is an exercise in organizational change. Engage specialists across the IT organization in building the solution. Establish a single service-support team across the IT group and enforce it with a cooperative, customer-focused culture.
Don’t be fooled by a tool that’s new. A new service desk tool alone won’t solve the problem. Service desk maturity improvements depend on putting in place the right people and processes to support the technology.

Impact and Result

Create a consistent customer service experience for service desk patrons, and increase efficiency, first-call resolution, and end-user satisfaction with the Service Desk.
Decrease time and cost to resolve service desk tickets.
Understand and address reporting needs to address root causes and measure success and build a solid foundation for future IT service improvements.

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should standardize the service desk, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you as you complete the project.

Standardize the Service Desk – Executive Brief

1. Lay service desk foundations

Identify your service desk challenges and strengths, review service support best practices, determine your operations metrics, and identify ticket handling procedures.

2. Design incident management processes

Discuss the building blocks of incident management process, incident workflows, ticket handling guidelines, prioritization, and escalation guidelines.

3. Design request fulfilment processes

Better understand request fulfillment process including service request workflows, proceeding with better knowledge management, and developing self-service portal to support shift-left strategy.

4. Plan the implementation of the service desk

Establish a clear service desk roadmap for each task, define timeline and ownership, and build a plan to communicate the changes to key stakeholders.

Guided Implementations

This guided implementation is an eight call advisory process.

Guided Implementation #1 - Lay service desk foundations

Call #1 - Conduct current-state assessment. Review shift-left service support strategy.

Call #2 - Identify operations metrics, and reports. Review ticket handling procedures.

Guided Implementation #2 - Design incident management processes

Call #1 - Map out incident management workflows.

Call #2 - Design categorization and identify escalation points.

Call #3 - Design prioritization guidelines and service-level objectives.

Guided Implementation #3 - Design request fulfilment processes

Call #1 - Differentiate between requests and projects, build request workflows, and make a self-service portal plan.

Call #2 - Design processes and workflows to produce a targeted knowledgebase.

Guided Implementation #4 - Plan the implementation of the service desk

Call #1 - Build a communication plan and implementation roadmap.

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Service Desk

Strengthen your service desk to build a strong foundation for ITSM maturity.
This course makes up part of the Infrastructure & Operations Certificate.

Course information:

Title: Service Desk
Number of Course Modules: 5
Estimated Time to Complete: 2-2.5 hours
Featured Analysts:
Mahmoud Ramin, Research Analyst, Infrastructure Practice
Allison Kinnaird, Research Lead, Infrastructure Practice
Now Playing: Academy: Service Desk | Executive Brief

Book Your Workshop

Onsite workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

Module 1: Lay Service Desk Foundations

The Purpose

Discover your challenges and understand what roles, metrics, and ticket handling procedures are needed to tackle the challenges.

Key Benefits Achieved

Set a clear understanding about the importance of service desk to your organization and service desk best practices.

Activities

Outputs

1.1

Assess current state of the service desk.

Current state assessment

1.2

Review service desk and shift-left strategy.

Shift-left strategy and implications

1.3

Identify agent roles and responsibilities.

Roles and responsibilities

1.4

Identify service desk metrics and reports.

Service desk metrics and reports

Module 2: Design Incident Management

The Purpose

Build workflows for incident and critical incident tickets.

Key Benefits Achieved

Distinguish incidents from service requests.
Ticket categorization facilitates ticket. routing and reporting.
Develop an SLA for your service desk team for a consistent service delivery.

Activities

Outputs

2.1

Build incident identification and logging processes.

Incident management challenges and metrics

2.2

Build incident and critical incident management workflows.

Incident and critical incident management workflows

2.3

Design ticket categorization scheme and proper ticket handling guidelines.

Ticket categorization scheme

2.4

Design incident escalation and prioritization guidelines.

Ticket escalation and prioritization guidelines

Module 3: Design Request Fulfilment

The Purpose

Build service request workflows and prepare self-service portal.

Key Benefits Achieved

Standardize request fulfilment processes.
Prepare for better knowledge management and leverage self-service portal to facilitate shift-left strategy.

Activities

Outputs

3.1

Build service request workflows.

Distinguishing criteria for requests and projects
Service request workflows and SLAs

3.2

Build a targeted knowledgebase.

Knowledgebase article template, processes, and workflows

3.3

Prepare for a self-serve portal project.

Self-service portal examples

Module 4: Build Project Implementation Plan

The Purpose

Now that you have laid the foundation of your service desk, put all the initiatives into an action plan.

Key Benefits Achieved

Discuss priorities, set timeline, and identify effort for your service desk.
Identify the benefits and impacts of communicating service desk initiatives to stakeholders and define channels to communicate service desk changes.

Activities

Outputs

4.1

Build a communication plan.

Project communication plan and workshop summary presentation

4.2

Build an implementation roadmap.

Project implementation and task list with associated owners

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this Blueprint, and what our clients have to say.

Client

Experience

Impact

$ Saved

Days Saved

Testimonial

Brockton Everlast Management Limited

Guided Implementation

10/10

$43,299

Reedy Creek Improvement District

Workshop

7/10

N/A

The instructor was very personable, easy to talk with. I felt it could have been a little shorter, some things were repeated often.

Corporation Of The City Of Orillia

Guided Implementation

8/10

$2,000

San Manuel Band of Mission Indians

Guided Implementation

10/10

$12,562

Natalie was extremely helpful and walked us through the process. I appreciate thorough she has been.

Hitchiner Manufacturing Company

Guided Implementation

10/10

$18,214

Natalie is great to work with. She is extremely knowledgeable of this topic. She helped us navigate the research to what was meaningful to our situation and helped us update the output from a workshop from 2013. The research has been updated but has n...

California State University, Stanislaus

Guided Implementation

10/10

$125K

City Of Bakersfield

Guided Implementation

10/10

$7,537

Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office

Guided Implementation

10/10

$12,562

Best - Darrin's knowledge, expertise and experience. Worst - Due to the pandemic, the virtual tools we used (Webex, Teams, etc.) were challenging at times due to the rest of the world using them at the same time.

City Of Bakersfield

Guided Implementation

10/10

$12,562

Cobb EMC

Workshop

10/10

$29,520

Workshop leaders were excellent... knowledge, understanding, examples, pacing, application... EXCELLENT!

Natural Resources Canada

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

We are excited and looking forward to undergoing a review of our current Service Desk practices and processes. We hope to further standardize our processes to improve our performance and enhance our client service experience. The session was very infor...

Keyano College

Guided Implementation

10/10

$25,000

The experience was excellent. Natalie was very knowledgeable and able to guide us through some difficult aspects of the implementation.

Keyano College

Guided Implementation

10/10

$25,000

The process was great. Natalie had excellent knowledge of service delivery and was able to provide great input into our environment.

Cross Country Mortgage, Inc.

Guided Implementation

10/10

$29,520

The initiative is a bit daunting, but Darin is very helpful in breaking it down into manageable pieces.

Knights of Columbus

Workshop

10/10

$2,546

This was an awesome workshop! Extremely valuable for our team. We walked away with tangible artifacts, a clear roadmap for next steps and areas to further discuss/deep dive. Our workshop host (Sumit Chowdhury) did an excellent job ensuring my needs (as company leader) where addressed in pre-meetings - and then performed an superb job engaging everyone and keeping the flow moving. My first real virtual workshop over multiple days (COVID 19) and it was a huge success. Will look to book Sumit again for future areas of interest. Thanks.

Westmoreland Mining LLC

Workshop

8/10

N/A

Hard to say what the financial impact will be as most of the gain will be in operational efficiency and standardization. Best part of the experience is exposing the broader team to the fact that there is a standards based approach to building and running a Service Desk. The worst part for me personally was that I only participated in the kick off and a couple of check points but then was asked to render opinions and decisions about matters which I did not participate in. Without full participation and exposure to the detailed conversations this felt very awkward to ask for my opinion on matter which I was unware of.

Cayman Islands Health Services Authority

Guided Implementation

8/10

$11,305

General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Workshop

10/10

N/A

Team gained a better understanding of the service desk standards. Presenters facilitation of conversation among our team. Receiving actionable deliverables as a result of the workshop.Flexibility to spread the time out via remote sessions. We do not have any specific "worst" experiences to report.

Utah Valley University

Workshop

8/10

$31,940

City of Virginia Beach

Guided Implementation

10/10

$14,446

Our analyst, Natalie, was great to work with and gave us follow-up emails summarizing the discussion and action items. Info-Tech has valuable tools and research that will save us time and money and put us on the right path to make improvements in our IT ...

Adler University

Guided Implementation

10/10

$20,500

120

Dark Fibre Africa

Guided Implementation

8/10

$29,520

Service is extremely good

Edmonton Economic Development Corporation

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

Clark Schaefer Hackett

Guided Implementation

9/10

$11,305

Government Employees Health Association Inc

Workshop

10/10

$27,636

My only feedback would be to offer more suggestions on how to setup our service desk. It felt like the advice was just what we came up with already.

Department of Justice Canada

Workshop

9/10

N/A

Ideally, we would have liked to hold this in person, but it was still an extremely valuable workshop session with our team. The topics were ideal for us, and the time spent on each topic. The focus was on very clear and concrete items, and the outputs ...

University Of Regina

Guided Implementation

9/10

$47,500

Allison is very knowledgeable in all aspects of IT Support - Help Desk and Desktop support. Her tips, suggestions and perspective help me to analyze and understand issues from a new perspective and quickly make operational changes to drive maximum benef...

Department of Justice Canada

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

We indicated N/A above because this is very difficult to quantify time and financial impacts... Our team is very "green" with respect to the Service Desk operation (since it has been outsourced for approx. 15 years), but we have greatly benefitted from ...

Aecon Construction Group Inc.

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

My experience was extremely positive - i dd not have a bad experience or a "worst part" The best part of my experience was working with Natalie Sansone. She was extremely knowledgeable, patient and was fantastic to work with. She was able to take my fee...

Tonkin and Taylor Ltd

Guided Implementation

7/10

$2,512

It was good to be able to get a stake in the ground of where our Service Desk was actually at, rather than by gut feel only. I got the most value out of the sessions where we stuck to the 'Standardise the Service Desk' script, rather than going ad hoc...