Ways to Improve the IT ServiceDesk for Better End-User Experience

By Stephen Mann

Presented By:

Intro

INTRODUCTIONMany corporate IT service desks continue to be under pressure to deliver better IT support - withboth end users and customers demanding increased e�ciency and a better service, and likely at a lower cost. So, service desks can’t a�ord to stand still, and the improvement of their operations, and of IT support in general, should be a crucial part of any corporate IT department’s strategies and improvement roadmap.However, it can be a tough ask - as, after enduring over a decade of IT-support budget cuts, finding new ways to improve the service desk might appear di�cult. Especially when operating with limited funding and people. Thankfully though, customer engagement and support advancements, including improved support technologies, can provide an easier route to both tangible service desk e�ciencies and employee - a�ecting improvements.

This E-Book o�ers five ways in which IT service desks can refine their strategies and operations to deliver a better end-user experience: Understanding and meeting the higher, consumer world-driven, expectations of employees Winning the IT self-service, increasing both employee adoption and value Exploiting automation - removing as much of the heavy lifting as possible, plus some of the “heavy thinking” O�ering knowledge management capabilities that actually work - for both end users and service desk agents. Getting more out of the corporate IT Service Management (ITSM) solution.

So, please read on to receive advice across all five of these areas.

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Meeting Consumer World-Driven Expectations of Support

The “consumerization of IT” - the use of personal devices, apps, and cloud services at work - has been a “thing” since 2005, even though some IT departments might have experienced its e�ects even earlier. But consumeriza-tion isn’t just about the use of consumer-world products and services in the workplace; and it isn’t just about the IT or IT services. It’s really the “consumerization of service”, with the increasing end-user expectations of corporate IT, based on employees’s personal-life experiences, also a�ecting the service delivery and support “envelope” that’s wrapped around theprovision of corporate IT services, For example:

The ease of access to, and communication with, IT The quality of support and customer service, plus the overall end-user - or customer experience

The latter is a now key di�erentiator in the business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) world - a way of winning and retaining customers. And, thanks to the continuing e�orts of consumerization, it’s now also applicable IT departments through increased employee expectations (which are, in the main, driven by their superior personal-life experiences). What IT Service Desks Need to Do It’s thus important for IT Service Desks in particular to understand what consumerization and customer experience are. That the former is more than the consumerization of IT, and that the latter is di�erent to both customer satisfac-tion and user experience. For instance, appreciating that a customer can receive great customer service but still have a poor customer experience.

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Winning with IT Self-ServiceThe provision of self-service and self-help capabilities o�ers IT departments the opportunity to improve the lives of both end users and IT sta�. To date, however, corporate self-service capabilities haven’t seen the expected (and needed) level of success, in particular because they don’t deliver against the employee expectations set by the use of consumer-world exemplars such as Amazon.

Surveys repeatedly show that the internal IT support industry as a whole has struggled with getting self-service right, and is now left with the need to increase employee self-service adoption, and value, to finally reap the promised self-service benefits, such as: 1. Cost Savings 2. Improved service desk availability and e�ciency (for IT and end users) 3. Easing service desk workloads 4. Delivering a better customer experience 5. Improved perceptions of IT

It’s important to understand that while circa 80% of IT departments have implemented some form of self-service capability , this is technology adoption rather than a true measure of self-service success. A better measure (of self-service success) is employee adoption, and rather than this being 80% this is closer to 10-15% . Thus, as an industry, IT support professionals continue to struggle with the creation of self-service capabilities that employees want to use and re-use.

At such low levels of employee adoption, a self-service capability will unfortunately fail to deliver on the expected costs savings or any of the other promised benefits, including a better end-user experience.

What IT Service Desks Need to DoThe first thing is to understand that there are many barriers to self-serivce success, and that these barriers need to be flipped into positive actions to be undertaken to increases the chances of success. These positive actions include, but are not limited to:

Treating self-service as a business project - recognizing that this is ultimately about better business operations, not the introduction of new technology. So, focus success measures on better end-user outcomes over aspects of technology delivery. Using organizational change management as much as possible - this is ultimately facilitating a change in the way of working more than it is training people to use a new technology. Learning from the mistakes of other “failed” IT self-service initiatives - whether internal or those of other IT departments. Involving end users from the get-go - because, with many unsuccessful self-service initiatives, the deliv-ered capabilities failed to meet end-user needs or were too complex for them to use. Planning for day-to-day operations, including the creation of e�ective knowledge management capabili-ties, and continuing to encourage self-service adoption post-launch - it’s an organizational change management staple.

Exploiting AutomationThe use of automation for IT management and ITSM is nothing new - from running simple data center scripts, ITSM-tool process automation, to the orchestration of third-party systems (including cloud services). And now, there’s also the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning for doing much of the “heavy thinking” as well as the more traditional heavy lifting.

Used correctly, automation will be of great help to IT service desks, with a wealth of potential benefits - including an improved customer, or end-user experience - thanks to increased support availability and speed of execution (see more on this below.

Auomation o�ers so much more too, with the more traditionally-espoused benefits including:Increased speed of execution - whether undertaking manual or “thinking” tasks, machines can do things much faster than humans can. Plus, they are available 24x7 and don’t need to stop to eat or sleep, or take vacations. They also scale – making the automation capability not just an extra team member but perhaps more of an extra team. Cost reductions - people aren’t cheap, and human labor still accounts for a significant part of the total IT budget. Thus, automation can be used to not only speed up execution but also to reduce the associated operational costs. Reduced “human error” - or, more specifically, a reduction in the unwanted consequences of human error. This might be business-a�ecting service downtime, and the associated adverse financial impact, or the e�ort required to rework things.Reduced human intervention - automation frees up highly-skilled, knowledgeable IT personnel from often-menial manual tasks to allow them to spend their time on greater value-add activities. Increased task adaptability - the changing of automation capabilities to reflect a new business need is so much easier than trying to elicit people change. The former is a one-time thing, whereas the latter requires a continued investment in ensuring that the new policies, procedures, and practices are being consistently applied by people used to “doing things the old way”.These benefits also apply to the numerous machine learning opportunities available to the IT Service Desk.

What IT Service Desks Need to DoMachine learning is ultimately another form of automation. It o�ers a wide range of opportunities to IT service desks, and for helping to improve the end-user experience in particular. Service desks should thus be investigating the “art of the machine-learning possible” now – understanding, trialing, and eventually employing capabilities that include:

• Providing more e�cient support - speed is an important facet of modern-day support and customer service. Machine learning can help with speed at a number of customer touchpoints, starting with understanding the end-user issue through voice-recognition capture or chatbots. It can also provide high-quality, and immediate, answers through knowledge management, which is covered in the next section.• Identifying and predicting issues – machine learning can identify common issues (what ITIL would call problems) or the signs of adverse things approaching, including in the assessment of change risk. It can also o�er up the most-likely resolutions for identified issues or schedule preventative maintenance.• Enhancing orchestration – machine learning can work in conjunction with existing orchestration capabilities to further remove the need for human intervention. For example, in making informed decisions, undertaking transactional data analysis, or identifying potential improvements based on historical performance.• Improving the e�ectiveness of knowledge management – machine learning o�ers capabilities that can significantly improve service desk’s ability to exploit knowledge. From intelligent search and recommendations, automatically identifying and filling knowledge gaps, to the use of intelligent autoresponders. There’smore detail on this in the next section.More and more businesses are investing in machine learning, often initially for external customer support. Service desks need to recognize that it’s a valuable next step in the evolution, utilization, and exploitation of automation for IT support that will both reduce costs and improve the end-user experience.

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Better Knowledge ExploitationOver the last few years, the importance of knowledge management to ITSM, and to IT service desk operations in particular, has increased. IT departments are tasked with “doing more with less (people)” and there’s the growing complexity of the IT estate, including the continuing impact of “bring your own device” (BYOD) and “shadow IT,” to contend with. The result is that service desk sta� need to be able to know more than they can ever personally know.Plus, there’s now also the need for e�ective knowledge management, or better knowledge exploitation, within corporate IT self-help capabilities. With it not only directly helping end users, but also providing what’s proba-bly the most e�ective self-service “stickiness” mechanism – a level of immediacy that will help to get end users using and reusing the self-service capability.However, knowledge management isn’t easy. The “knowledge is power” mindset used to limit the IT depart-ment’s ability to persuade its team members to share their knowledge. Nowadays though, the advent of consumer-world social media networks has helped – with sta� often wanting to be seen to be, and recognized for, sharing. But there are still many obstacles to traverse in making knowledge management work for the IT service desk, and in using it to deliver a better end-user experience.

What IT Service Desks Need to DoFor IT service desks to improve their knowledge management capabilities – and, in turn, to deliver a better end-user experience – there are a number of important knowledge management success “contributors” to consider and employ, including:

Thinking of knowledge management as a capability not just a process - understanding that it’s really a people, process, and technology thing; and thus, best to think of it as a corporate capability rather than simply another ITSM process.

Realizing that knowledge management is about engendering the right behaviors - any knowledge management initiative will fail if people aren’t “brought along” using proven organizational change management techniques. For instance, e�ectively selling the change (the “What’s in it for me?”), providing consistent and frequent communications, and o�ering the required level of education and training.

Recognizing that the link between people and what they know is very complicated - industry research has highlight-ed the di�culties of turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. For example, that “Knowledge is volun-teered, never conscripted,” “We only know what we know when we need to know it,” “We know more than we can say, we say more than we can write down,” and “The way we know things is not the way we say we know them.” So, bear this in mind when capturing knowledge from people.

Making knowledge management a business-as-usual activity, and motivating people - to succeed with knowledge management, it needs to be embedded within existing business processes. Plus, in addition to the embedding, operational metrics and employee recognition and reward frameworks need to change to reflect the new importance of knowledge management.

Considering the use of trusted knowledge management methodologies - for example, Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS), which creates knowledge (content) as a by-product of issue resolution. Or using the Level Zero Solvable (LZS) technique to support self-service/self-help knowledge management. LZS is a measure that can be used to predict the level of end-user success with self-help before launching self-service capabilities.

Looking beyond traditional ITSM - tool knowledge management capabilities - for instance, leveraging machine learning for:• Improved search capabilities, where intelligent search, based on previous search successes and failures, o�ers up a number of relevant options with a high degree of accuracy.• Intelligent autoresponders, where end-user emails and the resulting tickets are responded to and closed, when appropriate, by the technology without human involvement.• Identifying and filling knowledge gaps, where machine learning can identify knowledge-article gaps and convert documented ticket resolutions into knowledge articles to fill them.

All of which ultimately help service desks to exploit their knowledge better and deliver a superior end-user experience. Plus, improved knowledge management will help to deliver a better IT-user experience too.

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Getting More Out of the Corporate ITSM SolutionGetting more out of a service desk’s ITSM solution (or investing in a new one that delivers more) is a tricky and potentially touchy topic. Especially as IT service desks are often too busy to look beyond the tasks in hand to see new and greater opportunities to use what they already have to further improve e�ciency and the end-user experience. These opportunities might relate to what has already been covered – self-service, automation, knowledge management, and new technologies – or they might be something else. This might be okay, as some service desks might not need to do more than they already do. However, there will also be service desks that could improve and extend upon their capabilities (and their ITSM-tool use).

Such service desks might be using their ITSM tool suboptimally for a number of reasons, including: • Su�ering from RFP “overkill” - where the procured tool far exceeds their real needs. It’s usually where another company’s RFP is “borrowed” and then enhanced to give the “mother of all ITSM tool require-ments.” Or there’s the mindset that thinks it’s best to ask for everything possible “just in case.”• A lack of organizational change management e�ort - where the investment in people change doesn’t match the investment in the new technology and new processes. And thus, the latter then struggles to take hold.• Post-technology-project “inertia” - where there are grand plans for phases two and three of the ITSM improvement initiative but, once the technology is in and people are too busy with the day-to-day service desk pressures, the later phases never come to fruition (and are usually forgotten about until another ITSM tool selection project is initiated).

There might, of course, be more obvious reasons too, for instance: implementation and training issues, that the tool is overly complicated (to use and/or change) or too expensive to use more, or there’s limited vision and/or ambition to improve e�ciency and the end-user experience.

What IT Service Desks Need to DoIf there’s potentially scope to leverage the ITSM tool more – whether it’s to improve end-user experience or for other positive business outcomes – then the following steps should be followed:

1. Revisit the tool selection business requirements – identify things that were originally hoped for but missed out during the technology deployment. Understand which opportunities would still be relevant use cases for the ITSM tool. But don’t rush in, spend time reflecting on how business needs might have changed.

2. Identify how needs have changed in light of consumerization – appreciate that what was needed back then might be di�erent now. Or that there might be brand new needs. Speak with a sample of end users and customers about how their needs continue to change based on both business-driven changes and their growing expectations of support and customer service.

3. Seek help from the ITSM tool provider – perhaps undertake a tool-use audit and/or benchmarking exercise. It’s in the vendor’s best interest to help customers understand how to get more out of their ITSM tool investment.

4. Prioritize opportunities based on end-user and customer needs – it’s important to focus on what’s important to the important people.

5. Don’t feel obliged to use all of the tool’s capabilities – stay focused on the capabilities that solve issues, and deliver operational e�ciencies and a better end-user experience. And it’s not too late to reap “quickwins” years after an ITSM tool was deployed.

More and more businesses are investing in machine learning, often initially for external customer support. Service desks need to recognize that it’s a valuable next step in the evolution, utilization, and exploitation of automation for IT support that will both reduce costs and improve the end-user experience.

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Final SummaryThanks to the ongoing e�ects of consumerization, there’s a growing need for IT service desks to deliver a better end-user

experience. Consequently, IT departments need to step-up their IT support game, following strategies that place the empha-

sis on people support over IT support, and to increasingly o�er support experiences that are similar to what employees

receive in their personal lives.

This will involve:

1. Understanding the real impact of consumerization and the need for the end-user version of B2C customer experience

2. Realizing how self-service will improve end-user experience (as well as service desk operations) – but only if done right

3. Automating for better e�ciency and a better end-user experience wherever possible

4. Making knowledge management an end-user-experience asset not an operational albatross

5. Ensuring that maximum value is received from the organization’s ITSM tool investment.

EMAIL: sales@sunviewsoftware.comPHONE: 1-813-840-4027

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