The Service Desk
Practical Case
As an essential step in implementing the ITIL methodology in the company, the management of "Cater Matters" decided to set up a service desk centralising all the IT organisation's contacts with customers and suppliers.
To do so, the following decisions were made:
- A manager was appointed to be in charge of the Service Desk.
- After a careful analysis of the needs of the organisation and users, the main functions of the service desk were defined:
- Managing the first line of support for Incident Management.
- Monitoring the quality of service offered with respect to the SLAs.
- Providing sales-related information about the services offered.
- Conducting regular surveys on the level of customer satisfaction.
- Drawing up periodic reports with the information gathered.
- Running a small promotion to present the new services to existing and potential customers.
- Setting web space so as to channel user interaction through the web as much as possible, by means of:
- Forms for queries and reporting incidents.
- Remote querying (by means of the associated web services) of the state of active incidents, incident history and compliance with SLAs.
- Up-to-date FAQs allowing users to run their own queries on the services provided, known errors, etc.
- Drawing up a "Customer Care Manual" describing the different protocols for interaction with users, depending on the situation in question.
- Choosing a software tool to help record and manage all the Service Desk's information flows.
- Giving specific training:
- To staff responsible for dealing directly with users and customers on applying the "Customer Care Manual".
- On the software tools used.
- Creating a detailed plan for the progressive implementation of the Service Desk .
