Your organization’s service desk may be the only point of contact between your company and its users, which means the service it provides needs to be better than great. As employees continue to expect a digitally connected experience, the need for a comprehensive, convenient, personalized, and secure IT service desk will only increase. Providing excellent customer service is the one thing that will keep your employees focused on helping customers instead of dealing with technology issues that could stall their productivity. Therefore, investing in the experience they have with the service desk is key to keeping the business moving forward.
So, how can you provide better customer service to supersize the value of your service desk? Here are five tips to help you drive home the value, as well as how a modern platform solution like ServiceNow can help you deliver.
1. Take Advantage of AI to Automate Tasks
Consumers have come to expect a quick response to any and all of their requests. It’s all about who can provide the best service as quickly as possible, and technology has largely made that happen. This applies to employees too. That’s why it’s important to take advantage of AI to streamline your processes.
With AI, menial work shifts to the background, allowing your service desk team to focus on the things that really matter, like fine-tuning the employee experience and providing quick and accurate solutions. Platforms like ServiceNow use AI to help you provide consistent experiences across workspaces, create templates for use in a variety of situations, and automate repetitive tasks. Not only does this improve end-user satisfaction and allow you to deliver results faster, but it also eliminates manual errors. Let a machine and automated workflow take care of menial tasks and give your team the chance to connect with your end users instead, offering a highly personalized experience.
2. Empower Your Team
No service desk can operate with just one person. Take advantage of all the expert advice available to you by investing in your team and drawing them into the process as much as possible. Not only will this drive further internal engagement, but it will also help you gain more perspectives on how to further improve your processes.
Clearly, you want to hire the best people you can find to support your service desk. Once you find them, empower them to do what they do best and grant them the ability to make the decisions necessary to deliver an excellent employee experience.
On top of giving them the freedom to support end users how they see fit, boost transparency however possible. Host recurring meetings with your internal team to brainstorm new areas for improvement, and encourage each team member to contribute to the discussion. Create an internal end-user advisory group that you can bounce new ideas and improvements off of to see if they’d resonate well with the overall employee community. The more involved every person on your team is, the more comprehensive your solutions can be.
3. Focus on Proactivity, Not Reactivity
It can be easy to become more reactive than proactive while running your service desk. With requests flooding in and overwhelming your staff, your focus can easily shift to solving immediate problems and simply answering calls rather than looking ahead to solve future difficulties that could arise. However, proactivity is key to a powerful service desk. Being proactive can provide you with more time to think strategically, the ability to ensure the highest level of productivity, allow for greater flexibility, and even save you time and money. Because you are able to identify issues before they run rampant throughout your organization, you will save valuable company resources and reduce the turnover rate within your company. Trying to resolve issues after they have already caused damage is bound to be more costly.
To give your service desk the extra proactivity boost it needs, check in on all of your employees regularly. Don’t go too long without reaching out and asking how you can help, especially if you haven’t heard from them. While their silence could mean they haven’t encountered any pressing IT issues, it could also mean they aren’t satisfied with your assistance, so put in the extra effort to find out.
Data is another great tool you can use to proactively address your employees’ needs. Leveraging your service desk metrics to identify future concerns can help you give expert advice to your employees before they encounter significant problems. Using data based on your end users’ past requests, you can identify trends and address those issues instead of simply continuing to answer the same calls day in and day out.
4. Work under One Roof
Because service desk employees often work with a variety of systems, there can be a lot of frustration and anxiety while trying to manage all of these at once. Plus, switching between applications can be costly. According to research from RingCentral, most workers toggle between apps up to 10 times every hour, which means companies are losing up to 32 days of productive work per employee every year. On top of that issue, due to remote work, it’s even more difficult to unite your service desk team while they are separated by physical boundaries. To combat these problems, take advantage of modern platform solutions to bring all of this together under one application.
Comprehensive and modern platforms make it easy to view all systems under one platform. Not only does this allow you to manage and tailor solutions more easily, but it also helps you find the root of each problem and proactively attack it. For example, regardless of the number of systems your service desk is interfacing, ServiceNow can bring in all of that information under one system to help the team work through each request without spending too much time or energy switching between different systems. By consolidating your view, you will be able to eliminate the complexity of managing requests and address needs faster.
5. Invest in the Employee Experience
The most important aspect of any service desk is the experience you provide. You may be able to solve any IT issue, but if your employees aren’t satisfied with the experience they had with your team, they won’t come to you for help again. They’ll go off the grid, and that poses a risk to IT on all sorts of levels. For example, you may have ultimately given employees the help they needed, but if they were forced to wait in an hour-long phone call, it doesn’t matter. They will ultimately remember the hassle it took for them to get help, not the help they got.
Invest in the end-user experience by providing the human side to your technical processes. Check in with those you support regularly, treat them with empathy, and ask how else you can be of assistance. A little kindness goes a long way in a world dominated by apathetic technology. And while providing an effortless service desk experience may seem like a pipe dream, it’s more attainable than you may think.
Your service desk could be the key to retaining more employees in all areas of the business and enabling them to think more innovatively about how they can better serve their team. With these five tips, your service desk will be providing the best employee service in no time, especially in conjunction with ServiceNow. To learn more about how Crossfuze can help you supersize the value delivered by your service desk, reach out at LetsTalk@crossfuze.com.