Let’s begin with the basics: ITSM is a collection of management processes that help you manage and deliver IT Services.

ITIL is a structured framework that logically links those processes together.

It is a set of best practice guidelines and is most successful where organizations choose and use the parts that best suit their business.

A fix all? Or Scary complex?

Unfortunately ITIL , it is often made more complex and/or into a silver bullet that will solve all your IT Service problems.

It isn’t either of these things, but if applied well it will improve your IT Services by more than it costs you.

ITIL v3 encourages us to think about services as products and to deliver services that that our customers actually want.

In an age when the business and the Service Desk are striving to ensure that they are aligned and this is an important lesson, even if that is all you take from ITILfor now.

ITSM delivers great benefits, and earlier in this guide we put the Service Desk at the centre of ITIL®. So the focus should be to use these management processes to help us deliver a great service to our customers.

SLAs and OLAs are documents that define the processes that need to be followed. As a service desk you interface with support teams, both within and outside your business, such as network or system teams or 3rd party suppliers who contract to you for part of the support you provide.

In both of these areas you need to bear in mind that YOU will be seen by the customer as responsible for the quality of service provided by these people, so it is in your interest to ensure they are well managed.

The key thing is to use them as a way of building an effective working relationship and use that to prevent service shortfalls occurring – or if they do happen, as a way to rapidly fix them.

Gavin Cooper

Head of Global Marketing
GSS Infotech

Reach me at:
gavin.cooper@gssinfotech.com
Phone: + 1 518-724 3138

GSS Infotech Service Desk – Flexible, Quality, Cost Efficient

Your Service Desk is likely to be your company’s first point of contact with customers; your agents are the people your customers will most often work with when there’s a problem.

To the customer calling in, that this agent is your company, and if they’re not knowledgeable or helpful, the customer is likely to think your company isn’t, either.

There is always debate on the merits of outsourcing the Service Desk. Ultimately it depends on  whether outsourcing makes sense for your business or not.

• Increased Flexibility: Whether your business needs nine-to-five or around-the-clock support, outsourcing the service desk gives you the flexibility to scale up or down based on what your business demands.

• Reduced Operational Cost:  When you invest in creating a best-in-class Service Desk within your organization, you are likely to be investing significant amounts that its’ much harder to prove ROI on investment internally than enjoying the immediate cost efficiencies of outsourcing the function.

• Easier management: Managing Service Desks, an industry with a high degree of churn poses its own challenges. As an IT manager focused on bringing increased value to the business, your attention should be squarely on how IT can enable the business to do better. Instead, many in-house Service Desk managers get caught up in the day-to-day management rather than the improvement of service delivery.

Outsourcing may or may not work for your organization, in most cases it does.  Your decision, however, needs to be governed by the realities of your business and the needs of your customers/end-users.

Gavin Cooper

Head of Global Marketing
GSS Infotech

Reach me at:
gavin.cooper@gssinfotech.com
Phone: + 1 518-724 3138

Following my previous post (Part 1 )  Here

An End-User Support Portal is a fundamental to do more with less…

That sounds great but how? Firstly in order to make the efficiency changes you must have mature and documented processes. If not then this should be your first goal.

Then implement an end user portal that proactively builds into a knowledge hub for end users.
An end user support portal can auto-assign and streamline the workload and processes across the IT department.

After problem tickets are logged, users receive a confirmation e-mail which includes a link to the IT Service Desk portal where they can view all their tickets, check on status, or submit new requests.

Tickets raised can be automatically routed to the concerned expert who communicates with the end User this makes way for better informed decision-making, and automated data collection for continuous process improvement.The first port of call for any user becomes the portal.

Turn a negative into a positive

Use the headcount reduction as a catalyst to examine your existing processes. Whether you had to reduce headcount because of business pressures or you have a small team, a portal that takes some of the burden from your team, allows you to hire the right people for the right task.

This can be a win-win situation for both the users and service desk engineers. The latter become subject matter experts in specialized areas.

In addition to, cost savings on less service desk personnel and process automation, having a small team saves you the challenges of unnecessary inter dependencies or accountability issues. Having a single point of contact for all requests can also improve quality of service.

Gavin Cooper

Head of Global Marketing
GSS Infotech

Reach me at:
gavin.cooper@gssinfotech.com
Phone: + 1 518-724 3138

GSS Infotech Service Desk – Flexible, Quality, Cost Efficient

Whether your organization needs out of hours support, to supplement existing resources, to service specific call types or technology areas, or to outsource the entire function, GSS Infotech provides seamless integration with your existing IT environment. All services are customized to meet the technical support requirements of your organization.

For more information on our solutions please visit GSS Infotech Service Desk

According to a October 2010 Gartner study, first-contact resolution is a tried and true metric for the IT service desk with direct correlation to customer satisfaction, but many IT organizations still under-utilize it.

It sounds quite intuitive when you think about it: when a customer’s problem is resolved the first time he calls the Service Desk, his levels of customer satisfaction is likely to higher. But many Service Desks find it a challenge to understand this, instead preferring to measure performance with a slew of traditional measures that have little to do with the customer.

Agents are encouraged to keep call durations under a specific number, and achieving that statistic becomes the all-consuming target of every agent on the floor.

Supervisors are measured by the averages they maintain and coffee-break discussions are all about how teams are performing against the company standard. The problem: does anyone remember what the customer needs?

First Contact Resolution (FCR) is a measure that places the focus squarely on the customer. Research shows that for every 1% increase in FCR there is a 1% increase in customer satisfaction levels.

No other Service Desk measure is as strongly correlated to customer satisfaction as FCR is. When you measure service levels, speed of answer, talk time, calls handled by CSR, abandon rates, occupancy rates, call monitoring scores, the focus rests on the means rather than the end.

First Contact Resolution (FCR) is a measure that encompasses the not only the business inputs going into Service Desk business outcomes of its activities.

Gavin Cooper

Head of Global Marketing
GSS Infotech
Reach me at:
gavin.cooper@gssinfotech.com
Phone: + 1 518-724 3138