The Service Desk
Implementation
Implementing a Service Desk requires meticulous planning. First of all, you need to answer the following questions:
- What are the needs?
- What should its functions be?
- Who will be in charge of it?
- What professional qualifications will its team have?
- Will some services, such as hardware technical support, need to be outsourced?
- What structure should the Service Desk have (Distributed, centralised, virtual) to best meet your needs and those of your customers?
- What technology tools do you need?
- What metrics will be used to determine the performance of the Service Desk?
In addition to these technical questions, it is essential to consider other factors more directly linked to "human aspects". These can be just as important to the success of the Service Desk, or indeed more so, than technical factors:
- Establishing strict protocols for interaction with the customer.
- Motivating the staff responsible for direct customer relations.
- Informing customers of the benefits of this new customer care and support service.
- Ensuring management's commitment to the Service Desk philosophy.
- Sounding out customers to find out more about their needs and expectations.
The objective is NOT to set up the Service Desk as quickly as possible, but to create a Service Desk whose objectives are aligned with your business processes, that improves customer satisfaction, optimises the view of your organisation from the outside, and which serves as a platform on which to identify new business opportunities.
