Training levels
Service desk staff, according to Fitzgerald, tend not to be trained to as deep a level as helpdesk staff and tend to deal with more repetitive queries. Because there are a growing number of ways to service these kinds of repetitive questions, the value proposition of the helpdesk has actually increased.
“Many service desk calls tend to be about the same kind of thing so any well organised service desk is going to have a stock of almost scripted type answers. And then it will be the rare thing that is genuinely unforeseen, or unforeseeable, that requires real in-depth technical help,” she said.
“We work our service desk here to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) standards and part of that is incident analysis, looking at repeat incidents and repeat customer queries. You do this to identify standard requests. This means we can go back to our customers and say ‘Look, you got 10 calls this week about the same thing — there is either a root cause generating this incident, or it’s a coincidence that you’re getting the same question so much. Let’s either fix the root cause or automate the response.”
“On the other end of the spectrum are incidents that are just unpredictable, such as dealing with something that is broken. End users constantly amaze me with how they can take the unbreakable and break it and we’ve seen some absolute beauties. So you will get these too,” said Fitzgerald.
Frameworks
PFH Technology Group also advocates the use of the ITIL framework, which emphasises the importance of each individual call to the health of the corporate entity.
“If you take the example of Twitter or Facebook or one of those mediums, then many companies will feel that they need to respond quickly to queries posted publicly, because they otherwise might attract attention. So your responses are very much dependent on the interactions of other people,” said Chris Casey, service manager with PFH.
“Whereas in the corporate world responses depend on what the business requires and what is set down at service levels. The corporate world is a knowledge-based medium as opposed to a delivery medium. For example, we have a saying in PFH ‘Google is a great knowledge base but which option do you take when you get the answer’. Because you can get thousands of answers from Google but only an expert can tell you which is the right one for you.”
According to Casey, there are many ways the helpdesk function can be augmented and complemented by the new era of free flowing communication taking shape online.
New communication
“It’s important to ask are there useful ways in which the support desk can change to take advantage of things like web chats or instant messaging? Of course there are. The old fashioned system of ringing someone on the phone and having that be the only route to the expertise you need is gone. There more efficiencies to be gained by running things in different ways,” he said.
“People have less time than they used to and they don’t want to wait on endless hold for an answer that might not help them, they have other work to do. So it makes sense to enable them to file their query in the way that makes most sense for them.”
The subject of time is a thorny one when it comes to corporate communications because it is getting shorter. The changing nature of consumer/client expectation means that many people expect responses to complaints and service queries faster than before and research seems to show that response time expectations are getting shorter.
Where once a 24 hour response rate was considered good for a technical query, it is now likely that if a disgruntled customer or client does not have a satisfactory response in an hour or less, they are likely to feel they have not been dealt with properly.
Some companies have gone so far as to make response times part of their marketing message. In particular, the Dutch airline KLM updates its Twitter page header every five minutes to display its current live response times to queries.
Transparency boon
“We believe in the transparency of social media,” said KLM senior vice president Martijn van der Zee about the initiative. “Customers want to know what to expect from us. We now offer them real-time insight into our response time.”
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