Corona virus has impacted the world drastically. Most of the workforce including the support staff globally is forced to go remote. Employees have changed their working habits quickly with little time for preparation. In the rush to self-isolate as the pandemic spread, some employees are using their own laptops. IT service desk staff is also working from home, leaving the traditional phone-based support channels unmanned in some cases.
Our service desk has been supporting US customers 24×7. The surge of tickets and remote work compelled us to take a few important steps to manage the situation. We have been successfully managing our service desk operations without affecting customer experience or SLAs. Based on our experience and Gartner recommendations we have come up with a few best practices to follow during this pandemic to manage service desk operations efficiently.
The best practices are divided into 4 major areas such as:
Support staff preparedness, ITSM Systems, Service Desk operation tools and self-service & automation.
Support Staff Preparedness
Service desk personnel are the most important assets of any service desk operation. You need to make sure they are safe and working effectively from their homes.
Here are a few immediate steps, you can take in this pandemic situation:
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Ensure, the remote support staff is equipped with laptops, alternate ways to connect to the internet if the primary connection at home is down.
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Shift more resources on customer time-zone due to surge in ticket volumes.
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Ensure support staff has adequate calling means to support international customers.
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Setup new SLA’s with your customers (internal or external) due to pandemic situation and remote working of the support staff.
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Finally, frequent encouragement and appreciation of support staff’s hard work is important.
Newly developed skills and experiences acquired during the COVID-19 lockdown will certainly help transform your IT service desk from an old, human centric model to a new intelligent service desk model.
ITSM Systems
These days, most ITSM tools are SaaS-based and can be accessed from any internet connection or through a properly secured VPN.
Modern ITSM tools run on HTML5 web browsers, and many have adaptable UIs that scale for handheld or tablet devices.
Organizations running on premise ITSM systems need to provide the client software and open up remote access.
In the long run, it is advisable to switch to SaaS based tools with careful consideration of transition costs, foundation and transactional data migration, user training and workflow configuration.
Service Desk Operation Tools
Using the right tools for remote operations is an important parameter in running service desk operations effectively. Here are few recommendations regarding these tools:
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Leverage the existing collaboration tools especially those that business consumers are using frequently.
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Use collaboration tools with proper security options (e.g. Google-Meet, Microsoft Teams, Skype, etc.) to communicate with the customers as well as with internal teams.
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Ensure your collaboration tools can handle the sudden load of remote sessions.
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Ensure all end-point (desktops) management and diagnostic tools work properly in remote mode. These tools help support staff to run remote control session, install software, apply patches, updates and change configuration settings.
