Service Desk = a tool for effective IT management
One of the proven tools for communicating with IT for most medium and large enterprises is the Service Desk. It is the Single Point of Contact for all requests in the company – staff does not have to hunt around to find out whom to contact to report a malfunctioning device, a system crash or to request equipment.
Is the Service Desk only used for the IT function?
Not at all. The Service Desk is far from being ‘solely’ a tool exclusively for IT use. On the contrary. It is a communication tool for the whole company, whenever there may be some division of work or introduction of company-wide changes.
Companies routinely entrust to their Service Desk toolset their HR, administration, building, or fleet management agenda.
How to use the Service Desk?
A user enters a request into the system – a noisy laptop or a malfunctioning printer, say. Thanks to the Service Desk, s/he knows that the problem will be taken care of. S/he even gets informed of the resolution date. The request gets to the right person and in the right form – IT avoids duplicated solutions to the same request and having to deal with distracting phone calls or reminders.
Any user looking to have a problem solved is losing time, by definition
And what if the user didn’t know whom to contact and their company had no Service Desk? Well, in that case, the situation would only get worse. The despairing user then tries to solve the problem on their own, devotes all their time to the solution and stops working productively. Pretty soon they begin to distract others from their work.
Surveys show that employees lose up to a third of their annual work time figuring out with whom and how to solve some problems. With Service Desk, there is no further need to worry.
Service Desk Benefits
How about the quick implementation of necessary changes? Can users properly communicate their problem and is the IT department able to take care of it? Can issues be solved company-wide to save time? And does the IT department have the data to show management what it has been doing?
These are just some of the questions that the CIO / IT manager should know the answers to, and thanks to the Service Desk, they will.
1. Streamlining work
The IT department avoids unnecessary phone calls, emails, and visits, and the other departments save time they might otherwise spend trying (and failing) to resolve technical problems. Everything is together neatly and clearly, in one place. Users are in the picture as to who will take care of their issue and when, and communication runs as smoothly as a Swiss watch. In addition, the user does not need to know the particular solver personally, they just log a request to the department.
Problems don’t generate secondary issues.
2. Solving broadly-applicable issues
An indisputable advantage is the knowledge base of selected services. What if the user can’t get onto the company intranet while working from home, say. When they want to contact IT for the selected service, the knowledge base informs them they need to log in via VPN. This saves time for them and for IT, at all levels across the entire company.
3. Helping to implement system changes
How to get staff to follow new procedures day by day? If you’re using Service Desk, it’s going to be significantly easier.
You add a new entity to the workflow of the selected property, for example: ‘approval by the analytics team’. Until a request is approved, it cannot be progressed. This will ensure that everyone complies with the instigated changes right from the start.
4. It’s integrated into the apps users are familiar with
Service Desk tools are mindful of users’ reluctance to get to grips with new software, and so are becoming an integral part of communication tools such as Microsoft Outlook or Teams. Employees can make a request quickly and easily—from their usual software platform without having to sign into another app.
MS Teams supports the Service Desk
With the support of Service Desk, the potential of the platform itself is growing, which goes far beyond just chatting or video calls, and this potential can be expected to increase further. This is evidenced by the numbers: 500,000 companies are currently using Teams. In 2020, Microsoft registered 95 million new users, which was by far the most of any communication platform.
5. Service Desk doesn’t leave IT departments in the dark
How can the IT department present itself to the rest of the business? How is it to show its achievements and its actions within the company? Without a central register of all requests, this would be a difficult and, frankly, unrealistic task. Thanks to Service Desk, you are able to pull out the necessary data and then process it, e.g. in Power BI. You can present the data to show, say:
- 20% less time required to resolve requests for reported issues
- that a more careful record of reported incidents helped to identify and eliminate the causes;
- fewer total requests – so IT was able to spend time on more strategic things.
- Saving time
Imagine that the user has a problem with a noisy laptop that sometimes just freezes. If s/he contacted IT by phone/email, the technician would be starting from scratch in terms of information. They would have to find out the configuration of the computer, the history and date of acquisition, and much more.
Using the Service Desk in conjunction with Asset Management (for record-keeping, one of the frequent extensions to Service Desk), the technician looks up the info about assets entrusted to the user – working with a clear set of records. Thanks to which they find the required information immediately: they find out that there have been repeated problems with this PC, in addition, that it is 2 years out of warranty. So, they immediately raise a request for a new one, rather than trying to find a time-wasting solution.
6. Saving time
Imagine that the user has a problem with a noisy laptop that sometimes just freezes. If s/he contacted IT by phone/email, the technician would be starting from scratch in terms of information. They would have to find out the configuration of the computer, the history and date of acquisition, and much more.
Using the Service Desk in conjunction with Asset Management (for record-keeping, one of the frequent extensions to Service Desk), the technician looks up the info about assets entrusted to the user – working with a clear set of records. Thanks to which they find the required information immediately: they find out that there have been repeated problems with this PC, in addition, that it is 2 years out of warranty. So, they immediately raise a request for a new one, rather than trying to find a time-wasting solution.
7. The IT manager has an overview
Service Desk reports to the IT manager all the requests assigned to individual IT staff, with statistics about the meeting of respective obligations – so the manager is always in the picture and knows what is happening.
Service Desk is an effective tool, and users can keep using the original platform they’re used to. In addition, the IT department saves time and communication while process management in the company becomes more efficient and effective.
Do you want to learn more? Download our eBook - How to choose the best ITSM solution for you