This is the final blog in our five-part series on “Delivering a World Class Service Desk.” In our last installment, we explored the issues around outsourcing and offshoring: how to decide whether to do it, and how to make sure it works out. In this installment, we’ll look at how you can make sure your service desk can keep up with the demands of your business—without overspending on excess capacity.

Are you spending the right amount of money in the right ways to achieve optimal value for your service desk? If you had to stop and think about it, there’s a good chance the answer is no. Accurate and effective capacity management doesn’t happen by chance. To consistently meet service level requirements and agreements—while avoiding overspending—you need a systematic way to fully understand your customer requirements and demand patterns, and map them to your operational capabilities and supporting infrastructure services.

Service level requirements

First, establish the baseline parameters for your service desk. What are your hours of operations? What are your commitments for response time and resolution time? If you’re unable to meet these targets in a consistent and methodical way, there may well be a capacity issue at play. To understand exactly what it is, you’ll need to explore the factors discussed below, but it all starts with recognizing the red flags that indicate a problem. For good measure, this part of the exercise should also include a consideration of the cost of non-performance—that’s one more incentive to make sure you’re getting the job done right.

Demand management

Capacity management would be a lot simpler if demand remained nice and level over time—but that wouldn’t be nearly as interesting, would it? Instead, you get to map out the many factors that can send demand up or down, from gentle curves to sudden spikes. The better you can recognize and anticipate these trends, the better you can plan to accommodate them. Take into account:

• Critical business hours – Are there times of day that tend to see especially heavy call volume, whether due to peak user count, critical workloads, complex processes, or other factors?
• Seasonal trends – You probably already have a gut feeling for your heaviest seasons. Now put some data and analytics behind it: exactly when does that surge begin, how big does it get, and how long does it last? What are the drivers, and do they come into play to some degree at other times of year as well?
• Key business events – End-of-quarter order processing, holiday retail, new product releases, new promotional campaigns, M&A—there are many business events that can have a direct and fairly predictable impact on service desk demand. Make sure you have a reliable way to see them coming.
• Key IT events – Your change management discipline probably already encompasses major system releases and changes, new initiatives like BYOD and mobility, and other events that can confuse or concern some users. You need to be able to absorb that demand while meeting SLAs.
• Forecasting – Don’t assume you can know and anticipate all the factors that influence demand. Run a statistical analysis on call and incident volume to uncover hidden trends and enable more accurate forecasting.

Operational capabilities and costs

Now that you understand what you need to get done, evaluate whether you have what you need to get it done—and at what cost. This includes:

• Service desk skills inventory – Do you have the right skills in place to handle the kind of issues and incidents that come up in your environment? Has your service desk staff kept pace with the evolution of the technologies they support?
• Service desk skills distribution – Are some of your agents busier than others—or a lot busier? Do you have the right allocation of personnel across technical areas?
• Cost drivers – Is your cost structure efficient and sustainable? What’s your cost per incident for various types of incidents, and what’s your cost per service request for the kinds of requests you generally get? What’s your first-call resolution rate—the percentage of customer issues that were solved by the first phone call—and how does that correlate to staffing costs? If you know you need additional staff to meet service levels, can you justify exactly how many more you need?  Do you know how many is too much versus not enough?

Supporting infrastructure services

To get a complete picture of your capacity, you’ll also need to take into account the infrastructure through which support is delivered and managed. This breaks down into three areas:

• ITSM system capacity – Can your ITSM platform scale to meet the demands you place on it? Can it support every type of service delivery, from desktop to mobile to self-service? Does it enable seamless and efficient workflows to maximize the value of your staff?
• Telecommunications capacity – Do you have adequate phone circuits and bandwidth to support the volume of calls coming in? Communication delays will prolong mean time to repair (MTTR) and leave users hanging.
• Overflow services and off-hours support – Make sure you’re covered around the clock, regardless of volume, so that every user gets a prompt response to their issue.

The answers to the questions above will give you a much clearer and more complete understanding of the alignment of your operational capabilities and supporting infrastructure services with the requirements your service desk needs to fulfill. This is not a one-time exercise; you should remain alert to changes over time calling for additional capacity, or to opportunities to meet business demands more efficiently.

BMC offers powerful yet simple-to-use tools to help you manage the capacity of your service desk and your whole IT environment, including BMC TrueSight Capacity Optimization to manage and optimize infrastructure services, and BMC Remedy, our industry-leading ITSM platform, to help your service desk maintain peak efficiency.

This is the fourth blog in our five-part series on “Delivering a World Class Service Desk.” In our last installment, we presented five metrics to help you track your performance and make sure you’re hitting the right targets. In this blog, we’ll tackle the perennial questions of whether to outsource or offshore your service desk—and how to make sure it doesn’t impair your effectiveness.

As you seek to deliver the best IT services as cost-effectively as possible, you inevitably wrestle with a common and recurring IT strategy question: is outsourcing or offshoring the service desk an appropriate choice for your organization? There’s no one right answer. What’s best for someone else might not work for you, and vice versa. Instead, you’ll need to think carefully through the many factors that go into this decision—and that’s what we’ll cover in this blog.

The single most important consideration is whether the choice you make will enable you to meet the service level requirements (SLRs) of your business customers. You’ll first need to evaluate and validate those SLRs to provide a context for your decision. With those requirements in mind, here are a few other points to consider about offshoring, outsourcing, and whether they’re right for your business.

Outsourcing

At this point, we’re all quite familiar with outsourcing: you turn your entire service desk over to a contractor to provide as a service for your users. While the ownership model is different, it’s no less important for the service desk to function as a seamlessly integrated part of your organization, and respond fluidly, effectively, and reliably to the dynamic demands of your user base.

Scale-up/scale-down – Will your service provider allow you to scale up and scale down to meet peaks and valleys of demand? How quickly and effectively can they do so, and how will they bill for it? They should offer predictable cost plateaus to help plan and contain costs. Be careful not to sign up for a linear volume-based service charge or you could end up with large unplanned cost variances.

Service quality and service cost – Companies often look to outsource their service desk in order to improve service quality, drive down costs, or both. The trap they can fall into is the assumption that service support is a commodity that a third party will automatically be able to do better and cheaper. Maybe—but not necessarily. To determine how realistic these goals are, you first need to understand how you currently measure quality and cost, and then perform careful analysis of the opportunities for improvement on both sides. The last thing you want to do is to go through all the trouble of outsourcing, only to discover that you could have done it better yourself.

Managing change – We all know IT means constant change. How will the provider manage it? What processes are in place to ensure that they stay responsive to changes in your environment? What’s the fee structure? If the cost for each change is too high, you’ll pay a steep penalty for delivering the agility your business depends on.

Turnover – The way your provider treats its employees—reflected in its turnover rate—will have a direct impact on the attitude and quality of service your customers encounter when they call in. Ask to tour their facility. Would you want to work there? If you notice signs of employee dissatisfaction, it’s likely your users will too, and that can reflect badly on your business. If they constantly have to hire new people who barely understand your environment, that’ll make the wrong kind of difference too.

Talent – As we’ve discussed in earlier blogs, the people who work at your service desk are a critical element of its effectiveness. How will the provider staff your business? How do they hire and train, and what practices are in place to ensure consistently high staff performance?

Documentation – How prepared are you to fully document your support environment to the point where you could hand it over to a third party to operate? Is your staff capable of documenting and communicating every significant change you make to it? If you’re hesitating to answer, that can be a red flag. If your service desk provider is flying blind, it’s only a matter of time before things go sideways or worse.

Dedicated vs. shared support model – Will the supplier provide you with dedicated support resources who will learn your environment as well as your own support resources? If your company is only one of several customers being supported by the same team, you’re not going to get the kind of focused attention and consistent service you would with an in-house or dedicated team. The only way a provider can run a business that way is through truly commoditized service—and remember, the goal is always to provide differentiated, high-value service.

Offshoring

With offshoring, you keep the service desk in-house, but move it elsewhere—typically somewhere that support costs are more favorable than domestic costs.

Holidays – What national or religious holidays are observed in the country where your support services will be provided? How often will the office be closed, and how do these interruptions align with the calendars of your business and its customers?

Language – Are there language barriers, accents, idioms, or colloquialisms that might present challenges for effective service? Do you operate in multiple countries that require local language support? IT organizations hate the stereotype of the unintelligible service desk agent—make sure you’re not contributing to it.

Culture – How well do you understand the culture where your support services would be located? Some cultures don’t have the sensitivity to time management required for a rate-based service desk.

Facilities – Investments in facilities and facilitated maintenance should be considered carefully. How well do you understand the local real estate market, building codes, maintenance needs and practices, and other nuances of the place where you’d be locating? Does it seem like a sound investment—or a money pit in the making?

Management – How will offshore services be managed? What is the management culture like where you would consider locating? You’ll need to maintain the right level of control over the offshore operation, while avoiding the kind of lapses or questionable practices that can cause headaches back home.

Infrastructure – What are the local telecommunications and Internet infrastructure services like? Are they available, dependable and, cost efficient? Take nothing for granted—connectivity is a make-or-break proposition for any service desk.

Multi-site support – Will you need multiple offshore and/or onshore sites for providing 24 x 7 x 365 service support? Is your ITSM solution capable of supporting multiple locations—in multiple languages—with a single centralized database? Make sure your tools are well designed for the geographic footprint of your service organization. BMC ITSM can help with this one; you can learn more about our ability to support follow-the-sun service organizations here.

Hopefully this will help you decide where and by whom your user support services should be provided. In my next blog, we’ll talk about how to make sure you’re getting the right kind of value for the money you’re spending.

This is the third blog in our five-part series on “Delivering a World Class Service Desk.” In our last installment, we discussed three essential traits to look for in the people who staff your service desk. This time, we’ll talk about how you can track and measure performance to make sure your service desk is living up to user expectations as well as your own high standards.

There’s more to creating a world-class service desk than embracing the right tools and principles. To make sure your vision is translating into reality, it’s essential to measure the effectiveness of your service desk in the areas that matter most for efficiency, effectiveness, and customer satisfaction. There are endless key performance indicators (KPIs) to choose from, some more meaningful than others; this blog covers the most critical factors we pay attention to here at BMC. They’re not necessarily as sexy as the metrics-of-the-month around the latest ITSM trends, but they’re absolutely foundational. Simply put, without measuring these KPIs, there’s no way to know how well you’re really doing.

Here are the five most important KPIs to keep your high-performance service desk on track. By making sure you’re hitting these targets, and taking corrective measures when you fall short, you can drive real improvements in the service you deliver.

Increase/Decrease of Incident Re-Assignments

Incidents and requests that are moved among support teams take longer to resolve. Manage your teams to ensure that these are forwarded to the correct support group the first time by updating work logs and following incident management processes and best practices.

Details:

• Reporting frequency: Monthly
• Measurement procedure: Count of incident re-assignment per ticket
• Target range: <5

Decrease of Incorrectly Assigned Incidents

An incorrectly routed incident wastes everyone’s time and delays time to resolution. Again, manage this count downward by retraining service desk staff on incident management processes and best practices.

Details:

• Reporting frequency: Monthly
• Measurement procedure: Count of incident re-assigned/Total incidents * 100
• Target Range: 20% (or lower) – 35%

Increase in Incidents Responded within Target

Your responsiveness to reported incidents is a critical factor in both customer satisfaction and the credibility of IT among business users. Make sure you’re meeting expectations by hitting defined service level targets the vast majority of the time, and work to continually improve your success rate.

Details:

• Reporting frequency: Weekly/Monthly/Quarterly
• Measurement procedure: Incident Responded within Target/Total Resolved Incidents * 100
  • This should be measured by Priority where Critical is 100%
• Target Range:
  • >95% “Green”
  • 90 – 95% “Yellow”
  • <=90% “RED”

Increase in Incidents Resolved within Target

There may be no more important metric than your ability to fix problems as quickly as you’ve promised to. This metric validates your core effectiveness as a service desk in resolving incidents within defined service level targets.

Details:

• Reporting frequency: Weekly/Monthly/Quarterly
• Measurement procedure: Incident Responded within Target/Total Resolved Incidents * 100
  • This should be measured by Priority where Critical is 100%
• Target Range:
  • >95% “Green”
  • 90 – 95% “Yellow”
  • <=90% “RED”

Reduction in Aging Incidents by Priority (Backlog)

Your backlog should keep you up at night—it might well be costing your business users some sleep, too. Clear out aging incidents (defined as those more than 14 days old) to keep users satisfied and avoid high support time and cost.

Details:

• Reporting frequency: Weekly/Monthly/Quarterly
• Measurement procedure:
  • Aging: Today’s Date – Submit Date
  • Untouched Tickets: Today’s Date – Incident Last Modified
  • Aging Incident Count / Total Open Incident *100
• Target Range:
  • Overall <30%
  • Also by priority level
    • Critical: 0%
    • High: <5%
    • Medium: <10%
    • Low: <15%

These aren’t the only five KPIs you’ll use to measure the performance of your service desk, of course. There will be other meaningful factors to track according to the priorities of your business, the nature of your infrastructure, and the needs of your users. But if you’re consistently hitting and improving on these five metrics, you’re well on your way to becoming a truly high-performance service desk.

This blog is the first in our five-part series on “Delivering a World Class Service Desk.” In subsequent blogs we’ll explore key elements of success including providing hiring the best candidates, measuring the right things, knowing when to outsource and offshore, and managing capacity. Today, we’ll begin with a discussion of five ways you can provide the world-class service desk experience your users demand and expect—and your business success depends on.

 The service desk has always been a critical element of IT, but in this era of digital business, helping users maintain peak productivity takes on truly strategic importance. And it’s also harder than ever to do so. As enterprise environments become more complex, users and their tools become more sophisticated, and business pressures become more intense, you’ve got to raise your game to meet the challenge. The first step is to make sure the experience your service desk provides meets users’ expectations while showcasing the responsiveness, skill, and professionalism of your IT organization. Here are five ways to achieve that goal. 

1. Put people and relationships first

The service desk revolves around personal interactions, and their dynamics make a big difference in its effectiveness. An adversarial or remote relationship can make users less likely to seek the help they need, or erode morale among service desk personnel who feel unappreciated by their customers. To ensure a harmonious and productive relationship, it’s essential to invest in both your team and your customers. You can think about it in terms of these three Cs:

• Care – Pay attention to the work environment and education you provide for your help desk staff. When they feel comfortable, confident, and empowered, they’ll project that positive outlook to customers.
• Culture – Wow customers with the attitudes and behaviors you cultivate. Customer advocacy is critical—your staff should take pride in representing the interests of users. Make sure continual improvement is woven into your DNA.
• Community – Keep expertise and advice flowing freely among users and staff through forums, social and crowdsourcing tools, blogs, posts, and comments—better communication can drive better results.

2. Have a strategy

This sounds obvious, but it’s easy to get caught up in day-to-day operations and lose sight of the big picture. To be as effective as possible, you need to:

• Know your customers, know your demand – Learn your customer’s critical business processes. Full awareness of the impact of an issue is critical for timely escalation and engagement of essential resources.
• Define success and align processes – Know how to measure performance using the right metrics, KPIs, and critical success factors aligned to business outcomes. We’ll talk more about this in a future blog.
• Manage business value, not just cost – Understand where you’re driving the most value so you can align investments and resources based on true impact, not just dollars and cents.

3. Enable the right kinds of self-service

A consumerized workforce is fertile ground for self-service—as long as you go about it in the right way. Self-service is most suitable for high-volume, well defined, and pre-authorized service request fulfillment. You can also apply self-service to certain high-volume incidents, but the priority for a world-class service desk should really be to reduce and eliminate incidents like these through problem management.

How much is too much self-service? We’ve all had experiences with complicated problems where we clearly needed personal attention from a helpful representative—but instead had to comb through search results, navigate verbose IVRs, and interact with over-scripted chat-bots. Self-service should be a value-add, not a barrier to live help. No one should ever have to keep yelling “representative!” in desperation.

Training videos can be excellent self-service tools if they are well-produced, informative, and digestible in reasonable chunks. You don’t want to belabor simple concepts with overly long videos; similarly, you don’t want to burn people out with documentary-length productions that cover too much ground on complicated topics. Bite-sized segments make for the most effective and efficient learning experiences.

Your knowledge base can be a tremendous resource for users and help divert many Level 1 calls. Make sure your QA team publishes known errors and workarounds for new systems before they’re deployed into production so the answers are ready when users need them. Articles should be of consistent quality and actually solve the problem—or, if no solution is available, acknowledge the issue and provide a timeframe for resolution. The search function is mission-critical; it doesn’t matter how good your content is if people can’t get accurate results quickly and easily.

4. Use the best technology

ITSM tools have evolved rapidly in recent years—and your service desk genuinely needs those next-generation features to get the job done. Self-service portals and social capabilities can help users meet their own needs, while geographic awareness capabilities, mobile apps, and remote control tools enable your staff to deliver service wherever it’s needed. Communications channels should encompass IVR, CTI, live chat, and video conferencing; for major deployments and incidents, you should be ready to provide information and assistance at scale via email, SMS, and intranet.

5. Bring the future to the now

Your service desk should be every bit as innovative as the business it supports. Adopt a digital business model to empower your help desk to provide better service. Use predictive analytics to anticipate and meet dynamic needs more effectively. Self-healing services and self-aware systems can improve uptime and performance for the systems your staff relies on. Skills development should be an ongoing process to keep up with dynamic enterprise technologies and ever-changing business and user needs. Continually review and adjust metrics so you’re always aligning effort with impact. And always, always stay close to your customers so you can understand what they need now, what they’ll need tomorrow, and how you can better provide the world class help desk experience they deserve.

Many of the tools and innovations I’ve mentioned here have already been implemented and recognized as best of breed in the BMC ITSM platforms.   For my next blog, we’ll explore hiring practices for a world class service desk.