What makes a good Service Desk?

We asked this question to Aaron Hubert, one of our team of Service Desk Engineers and this is what he said:

‘‘It’s several things really. For me, the most important aspect would be the team; by working well together this helps us deliver excellent customer service to every client that requires support – we are after all, a customer centric business.

This excellent customer service is built around our knowledge of our clients, their operations and their technical needs, so when a request comes in and a support ticket is raised there’s always someone technical on hand to provide qualified assistance, with the intention to fix the problem immediately. In many cases this is entirely possible which means we’re very proud of our first-time fix rate. And I should say, this is all without trying to be too technical with the customer so, I’d add ‘good communicator’ in there as well!

Working on the Service Desk is no easy task: by having the most exposure to each client the business supports, you need to have a substantial and broad knowledge of multiple systems a client may be using, which makes the role challenging, varied and interesting.

We’re the central hub of the business so the team should work well together and be able to think on their feet and be keen problem solvers. By having these qualities, it helps to develop a streamlined process, working quickly and efficiently when needed, as support requests could range from desktops, servers, software or entire infrastructure outages.

Having so many different volumes and variations of client requests every day it’s important for us all to work ‘with’ and not ‘for’ the customer. By identifying the customer as a partner, it helps us treat problems as our own and provide a level of service that we’d expect ourselves. With the team working in this way it really helps to promote a caring approach and lives up to our company values towards our clients of ‘partnership, respect, fairness, credibility and keeping our commitments.’

Being the first point of contact for the customer and a team that interacts with all areas of the business it’s important that all staff on the Service Desk are ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) certified as it’s widely regarded as the best framework to adopt for IT Service Desk management. This helps to ensure our customers’ requests are dealt with as effectively as possible, directed to the correct department within the business with the highest level of customer experience.

It’s extremely rewarding to get good feedback from clients who comment on the level of service they’ve received and a resolution for the issue in a timely manner. I think they’re even more grateful when we’ve achieved that outside normal office working hours. If a businesses’ systems go down at any time, they are losing productivity so we all go that extra mile to ensure they are back up and running as soon as possible.”