10 essential steps to efficient & effective IT support

Table of contents

• Introduction
  
  
• The drive to efficiency – setting the scene
  
  
• Step 1- The key question
  
  
• Step 2 - Coping with volume
  
  • The basics of reducing volume
    
    
• Step 3 - Automation – how effective is it?
  • Technology to automate the service desk
    
    
• Step 4 - Automation and user satisfaction: the balance
  
  
• Step 5 - Becoming proactive to drive more efficiency
  
  
• Step 6 - How reporting can underpin the efficiency drive
  • Reporting Case Study
    
    
• Step 7 - ITIL best practice
  
  
• Step 8 - Staff - the importance of people
  
  
• Step 9 - Which system is more efficient?
  
  
• Step 10 - Taking on more responsibility
  
  
• The next steps
  
  
• References

Introduction

The scale and seriousness of the economic turmoil which gripped the world’s financial markets made the media predictions of a ‘credit crunch’ earlier in the year seem quaint and almost playful. As the reality hits, there is now no doubt that IT, like all parts of the business, will have to work as efficiently as possible. This white paper will help IT managers and service desk managers maximise their current systems and processes, work as effectively as possible, and understand how investment at this difficult time can be justified.

The drive to efficiency – setting the scene

Over 40 per cent of large businesses have cut their IT budgets in 2008, according to research group Forrester (1) as the economic downturn - which some say is just beginning - begins to bite. The effects are likely to be even more pronounced for smaller businesses in the next few years, with new projects being frozen as funds are diverted to offset falling revenues. The watchwords, understandably during the next year, will be efficiency and streamlining.  Service desk managers and IT departments have two choices, either find improved efficiency or be forced to absorb further budget cuts and possible job loses. Thankfully there are many strategies that IT service desk managers can adopt to safeguard against this period of unrest. This whitepaper offers advice to help service desk managers gain efficiencies and prepare for any further turmoil in the market.

Step 1 - The key question

The pertinent question to begin any investigation into efficiency is this: “Is my service desk running as effectively as possible?”  By taking this as a starting point, IT departments can quickly identify where improvements can be made. The most important advice here is to consult as many people as possible before embarking on any plan of action. There are numerous strategies that could be employed and there are many people external to the business who will gladly offer advice on how to transform your working practices - advice that may well be totally relevant and valid. But before considering any changes, first talk to the staff within your business. The front line service desk staff know two things better than anyone: What the problems are that consistently crop up and drain resources? Which processes and system issues hinder problem resolution?

It could be a simple idea; perhaps the call handling system asks a couple of questions that are only relevant to a handful of calls. Removing these questions could shave 30 seconds off each support call, which over the course of the year adds up to a significant saving. The message is to speak to staff before trying to implement change. It is a huge waste of time and the business’ money if a change that is implemented proves to be counter-productive, but it is only spotted during roll-out when staff who are using the system get involved.

Step 2 - Coping with volume

The major cost for the service desk is not the difficulty or complexity of the job, but volume of issues.  Logic would dictate that increased IT literacy created by the ubiquity of computing would lead to a reduction in the number of support calls. This is not the case, as research from Gartner states that the average user has cause to contact the service desk once a month (2), a frequency of contact which has refused to fall over the past decade. 

Service desk software can reduce call volume by informing users of planned outages to save the influx of calls, improved use of the intranet to mass inform about problems etc. But the message from the Gartner research is that, although these strategies may have stopped some contact, they are replaced by other issues. Users are busier than ever with technology getting more complex, and these two factors grow every day, meaning that the service desk has to find a way to cope with volume. The key is not the number of queries, rather how these queries are dealt with and the time it takes to resolve them. That is key to efficiency. Gartner once again looked into this issue and discovered that the average support call takes 17 minutes. It is a simple calculation to see that if this figure can be reduced, money will be saved.

The basics of reducing volume

In order to create an efficient service desk which copes with volume, the first aim is to ensure that all the issues fielded by the service desk, and its reactions to these incidents, are logged.  An accurate record of activity immediately shores up a major efficiency leak. Lost information requires additional calls, both from the service desk, which is forced to use resources tracking down information vital to address the incident, and from users seeking resolution. It also slows down fault resolution and makes proactive service impossible.

The solution is to create a watertight process which ensures that all data accurately and meticulously records the dialogue and activity between users and the service desk. There are pre-defined process methodologies which can be adopted to provide guidance, most notably ITIL (which is discussed further in Step 7), but the complexity of service desk activity means that, for all but the smallest business, manual management of such processes are not realistic and this is where a service desk tool is essential. The type of service desk software used is discussed in Step 9.

Step 3 - Automation – how effective is it?

Historically, the majority of support departments offer a phone number as the primary medium to communicate with users and most people will naturally make a call when they have a problem because of this legacy. The issue from the service desk’s perspective is that fielding phone calls is highly disruptive because a member of staff who could be focused on problem or project management is forced to stop what they are doing to pick up the call. A more logical step to take would be to offer automated options to customers.

There is a cultural fear of a user backlash for taking this approach, but self-service options can actually lead to improved service levels as well as efficiency gains (there is more detail on this subject in Step 4). But the potential for automation and self-service to reduce costs means that it is impossible to discount, regardless of the practical and cultural issues it brings. Forrester Research, for example, says that the average phone-based support call costs the business around £20, while a self-service option can fix the same issue for less than 50 pence (3). Some organisations have taken away the ability to phone the service desk and instead offer support via knowledge bases, FAQ’s and other online tools, backed up as a last resort by email. Understandably there is a mental block to this approach, with the service desk naturally concerned that users will become frustrated by the lack of phone contact. However, once the initial culture shock is overcome there is one factor which will decide whether a customer accepts a new support mechanism: satisfaction.

Only in creating, trialling and proving the effectiveness of automated support can you be confident that users will accept it.

Technology to automate the service desk

There are many technologies which offer potential efficiency gains in a service desk environment:

• Self logging and tracking of incidents.
• Access to a knowledge base which can be used by service desk staff and, if a direct connection is offered through a portal to end users. 
• Automatic incident creation from incoming e-mails.
• Predefined templates allowing rapid capture of commonly recurring incidents.
• Skills based routing of calls.
• Automatic notifications to operators and customers when an incident is resolved or a workaround is available.

With any self-service, self-logging and tracking tool, the key element is making sure that not only is the right information offered to users, but that the right data is captured. If the users are offered a blank form and asked to explain the issue, the service desk will inevitably receive a patchy approximation of the situation which will require a follow-up email or call, negating the time and labour saving that such a facility is supposed to create. The service desk needs to offer forms which steps users through the information needed to address the issue, with key fields made mandatory for the issue to be logged. Once the service desk has gathered the right information about the issue, a skills matrix can be consulted to enable routing of the query through to the appropriate member of staff.  This saves the prevalent and inefficient practice of calls being passed through multiple staff and lines of support, and also minimises the time users need to spend on the call.

Step 4 - Automation and user satisfaction: the balance

There is an understandable fear that in automating IT support, the dehumanised service becomes disagreeable for users. It could also undermine any attempts by IT to align with the business by foregoing the chance to speak to the users on a daily basis. To understand these considerations better, we must consider what is meant by customer service in an IT support sense.

In the late nineties, there was much discussion around the need for the IT support desk to improve customer service levels in order to help professionalise the way that computers were supported. Much of the focus at that time was concentrated on the phone manner of service desk operatives; offering tips on how to listen better and communicate ideas, and conversations were often led by scripts. Such an approach missed the point of customer service which at its base is about problem resolution. Most customers or users contact the service desk because of an inconvenient problem, and the key measure of the quality of the function is how quickly and effectively the issue is addressed, not necessarily the manner of the person on the end of the phone. That considered, self logging, tracking, automated email notifications etc. can actually generate much greater customer satisfaction than the more expensive option of a phone call, because they offer the ability for rapid resolution, even out of hours, for problems the user might be experiencing.

One way to overcome the cultural acceptance issues is to tailor the information presented to the user through the self-service portal. SupportDesk’s self-service portal allows you to group users and offer different experiences for each group depending on their IT ability and needs. In practice, this means that certain technically minded users will have full access to all the appropriate knowledge tools and will be given more flexibility in working with the service desk tools, whereas other users will be guided more rigidly through the support process.

Step 5 - Becoming proactive to drive more efficiency

The idea of the service desk seeking and addressing problems before they occur, rather than just reacting to users flagging up issues, is extremely attractive. Making a service desk work in this manner is hard to do in practice because of the following factors of the time contradiction. A service desk needs more time if it wants to proactively attack problems, but because it is reacting to the very problems it wants to forsee, it does not have the time to stop them occurring. The solution is to start much earlier in the service cycle, by focusing on dealing and reducing volumes using the methods outlined in Steps 2 and 3. By separating the pure volume calls (requests for equipment, etc.) from the detailed problems that require human intervention, the service desk begins to free up resources and break the time contradiction.

The second and third factors central to becoming proactive is categorisation and reporting. Once a service desk is able to categorise every issue it deals with the historical data can be used to produce reports which in turn help identify frequently occurring issues (more detail on reporting comes in Step 6).

Once the key issues are recognised the service desk can decide what the priorities are. Perhaps password resets are causing a drain on resources, in which case the support team could decide whether it could justify the time and cost to develop a new process for automatically allowing users to reset their own passwords. If such a facility already exists and users are not taking advantage of it, the solution could be sending a note to the training team to make password resets a priority issue. The final part of becoming proactive is to communicate effectively. As well as analysis of the calls received, there are other factors which generate calls to the service desk; project work, planned maintenance, etc. and it is essential that the service desk has clear lines of communication with personnel in control of these factors. Once the desk has all this data, then it must communicate these issues with the users.

This can be done via the corporate intranet or email and, if managed correctly, will drastically reduce the call volumes into the service desk by warning users about problems which normally would have them reaching for the phone. A word of warning however; be careful not to spam users with unnecessary information. Only send a communication if it is relevant to the individual receiving it, otherwise it will be lost in the torrent of data most workers receive each day, negating its purpose.

Step 6 - How reporting can underpin the efficiency drive

There are two elements that make reporting attractive in terms of finding efficiencies within the service desk.

1. Reporting offers the ability for the service desk to show the business what it is doing. This is vital for securing funding and also showing where money could be spent to make further improvements.
2. Reporting offers visibility of issues that are blighting the service desk and stretching its resources. Transparency also allows the service desk to offer guidance on user training because it can see commonly recurring issues.   

Data is not attractive to look at; therefore reporting must be relevant, interactive and insightful. Producing reports can be laborious so an element of automation is desirable, while the reports themselves must be to the point and ideally be presented graphically. It is a powerful tool for service desk managers to be able to display a graph showing the breakdown of work being carried out. Once the service desk has reached a point where it can communicate the direct impact its services have on the business, it can take this intelligence to the board, to stabilise or improve the level of funding it receives.

Reporting case study

The procurement team has evaluated that an upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft Office is not a priority. The new features it introduces will not make any significant impact over the incumbent version, which has only been in place for three years; therefore the upgrade expenditure cannot be justified. However, the service desk is frequently taking calls from users who are receiving Office documents they cannot open. This is because the new version saves into a new .docx format by default which cannot be opened by previous versions of Office. There are tangible and intangible inefficiencies here that the service desk can use to prove that the upgrade would be beneficial. The intangible is the disruption to the user, who is unable to progress the job and will have to contact the sender to ask that the document is re-saved as an older version, which potentially creates the impression that the business is unprofessional. The tangible is the downtime from the user point of view, as well as the cost of each support call. Accurate reporting in this case can provide multiple wins for the service desk.

Step 7 - ITIL best practice

Much has been written about the value and importance of ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) in recent years, with good justification. ITIL offers a proven framework for building and maintaining solid and efficient service desk working practices.  It is documented common sense, is hugely useful for any organisation starting from scratch in terms of arranging their processes, and offers solid advice for those with an established set of working practices.

Research from the Service Desk Institute says that adoption of ITIL has fuelled a dramatic increase in the first line resolution rate, which has gone from 21 per cent in 2004 up to 60 per cent in 2008 (4). In short, ITIL can help plug gaps in service delivery and will help generate efficiencies in the business. One of the issues to be wary of with regards to ITIL is that it has become, for many organisations, a ‘tick-in-the-box’ activity. Businesses are taking the time to learn about ITIL, attending the courses, buying the products that feature ITIL processes, and then doing nothing else with it. The ITIL world is also quite insular, with those involved with it being very technically minded, perhaps at the expense of absorbing the goings-on in the wider business world.

Steps have been made to address this disconnect with ITIL Version 3, which talks in detail about linking IT activities to the rest of the business. However it is worth re-iterating a point made earlier; when it comes to finding ways to improve efficiency, there is no substitute for getting on the ‘shop floor’ and seeing how the business operates.

In terms of value when working with ITIL, be aware of the potential pitfalls of modular software as offered by many service desk software vendors.  The promise of modular software is that it allows you to add ITIL disciplines as and when you require them. This is fine in theory because almost all ITIL projects are rolled-out in stages; perhaps incident, change and then problem management, with the development of the CMDB (Configuration Management Database) getting underway early in the ITIL project. The problem is not modular software per se; it is that most vendors will charge to add additional ITIL functions. Richmond’s approach with SupportDesk is to offer all of their ITIL processes from day one, but gives the option to switch them on when required without the need to upgrade the software or incur additional costs. For further details regarding ITIL processes in Richmond SupportDesk visit: www.richmondsupportdesk.com/ITIL/itil.htm.

Step 8 - Staff - the importance of people

Attrition rates in IT support are generally high, staff spend lots of time dealing with repetitive enquiries and the job is generally seen as a stepping stone. Automation can take away some of the mundane aspects of the role, and allow service desk staff to become more empowered business problem solvers with a chance to influence and help other parts of the business. Traditionally, service desk staff arrive at work on a Monday and attend a meeting where they discover how they performed last week. This can be very de-motivating and daunting. A much better use of reporting would let staff see KPI activity and their personal impact on it at all times, giving them the opportunity to impact the numbers at the coal-face.

Do not underestimate the importance of ‘soft’ issues such as staff motivation and satisfaction.  Studies by Aberdeen Group (5) show that the deployment of an effective workforce management system can improve both employee retention and workforce capacity utilisation by 31 per cent, while employee performance can improve by 27 per cent. It will be very easy during a recession to push staff harder than before in order to maximise spend, but be aware that this can be counter-productive as a de-motivated workforce is less effective than happy employees.

Step 9 - What system is more efficient?

We have established that service desk software is essential for any desk that wishes to gain efficiencies through formalisation of processes. The type and age of the service desk software has a major influence over how far a programme of improvement can go.  

Many service desks use software that was developed in-house. Although it may serve a purpose, there are several factors to consider when judging the suitability of such a system.  Firstly, the knowledge of how the system works lies with one individual. If they do not have the time to fix issues and develop upgrades as the business needs change, the product will quickly become a burden. Furthermore if the person leaves, all knowledge of that system is lost which is potentially dangerous to the organisation. There are other downsides to using a self-build system which are shared by older systems - even those supplied by a specialist service desk supplier. The majority of older systems do not offer the ability for users to log and track their calls, functionality which, as we have seen, can vastly improve efficiency and service quality. Reporting will also be either non-existent or very difficult to extract.

The ability to offer web access to the system - a pre-requisite for self-service and self-logging and tracking - is likely to be absent. Older systems force businesses to work in certain ways and, as this paper has detailed, the drive for efficiency requires a degree of flexibility that only the latest systems can offer.

Step 10 - Taking on more responsibility - the next step

It may seem outlandish that the service desk could become more efficient by taking on more responsibility, but it is true if a global view of efficiency is considered. Many service desks are now adding functions such as HR and facilities management into the mix, which lets these business elements benefit from the improved efficiency of a strictly defined set of processes. There is also an ancillary benefit which does impact the service desk directly.

For example, if the process for adding a new member of staff is defined and runs smoothly, it will save workload on the service desk as the new start chases up a new PC, log-in details, etc. This type of expansion is only recommended for those businesses which have tackled the subjects discussed earlier in this paper. Only once the service desk is dealing with its core processes effectively can it take on further work, but the rewards for doing so are enormous, not least for helping cement the vital role that an efficient, proactive service desk plays in modern business.

The Next Steps

If you are not already a user of SupportDesk there are two easy steps to take to further investigate the software benefits. Firstly a live one-to-one web based demonstration enabling you to see SupportDesk in action. This is the perfect opportunity to get answers to your questions while seeing the software demonstrated for your specific requirements. To book a demonstration click here: www.richmondsupportdesk.com/html/registration.asp.

The second option is to download a complimentary 30 day trial version of SupportDesk by visiting: www.richmondsupportdesk.com/downloads.

If you would like to discuss further your service desk needs to see how Richmond Systems can be of assistance please call +44 (0)1428 641616.

References

1. "The State Of Enterprise IT Services: 2008". Forrester Research
2. Quote from Claudio Da Rold, vice president and analyst at Gartner
3. Figures from Forrester Research
4. Service Desk Institute (SDI) UK 2008 Service Desk Software Vendors Report – Understanding the Customer Experience of the ITSM market.
5. “Strategies in Workforce Planning: Using Talent Acquisition & Performance Management Programs to Meet Tomorrow’s Business Needs” Aberdeen Group.

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