Anecdote

Environment

Specialized Service Desk groups

Follow the Sun

Some global or international organizations may wish to combine two or more of their geographically dispersed Service Desk s to provide a 24-hour follow-the-sun service. For example, a Service Desk in Asia–Pacific may handle calls during its standard office hours and at the end of this period it may hand over responsibility for any open incidents to a European-based desk. That desk will handle these calls alongside its own incidents during its standard day and then hand over to a USA-based desk – which finally hands back responsibility to the Asia–Pacific desk to complete the cycle.

This can give 24-hour coverage at relatively low cost, as no desk has to work more than a single shift. However, the same safeguards of common processes, tools, shared database of information and culture must be addressed for this approach to proceed – and well-controlled escalation and handover processes are needed.

For some organizations it might be beneficial to create ‘specialist groups’ within the overall Service Desk structure, so that incidents relating to a particular IT service can be routed directly (normally via telephony selection or a web-based interface) to the specialist group. This can allow faster resolution of these incidents, through greater familiarity and specialist training.

The selection would be made using a script along the lines of ‘If your call is about the X Service, please press 1 now, otherwise please hold for a Service Desk analyst’.

Care is needed not to over complicate the selection, so specialist groups should only be considered for a very small number of key services where these exist, and where call rates about that service justify a separate specialist group.

The environment where the Service Desk is to be located should be carefully chosen. Where possible, the following facilities should be provided:

• A location where the entire function can be positioned with sufficient natural light and overall space – to allow adequate desk and storage-space, and room to move around if necessary

One company found that there was a ‘them and us’ culture existing between the Service Desk and the other support teams. The third-line teams often believed themselves to be better than the Service Desk. Hiding the Service Desk away in an isolated room helped to reinforce this culture. The company found that creating an open-plan office with the Service Desk in the middle encouraged closer working and helped to break down these barriers

• A quiet environment with adequate acoustic control so that one telephone conversation is not disrupted by another
• Pleasant surroundings and comfortable furniture so as to lighten the mood (the Service Desk can be a very stressful place to work, so every little helps!)
• A separate rest-room and refreshment area nearby so that staff can take short breaks as appropriate when necessary without being away for too long.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23