11 ITIL Service Desk Best Practices to Supercharge your Service Delivery

A service desk is the nerve center for all activities related to IT service delivery. It’s at the forefront of all interactions an organization has with its requesters.

Implementing a service desk involves processes, workflows, and domain knowledge. That’s why most people stick to a framework when setting up a service desk. Learn more about the most popular ITSM framework.

A service desk comes with numerous challenges that can be overcome if you are aware of the best practices.

In this blog, we will discuss the best practices grouped by the following:

• Practices to better productivity.
• Practices to better manage metrics.
• Practices for optimization
• Practices to manage knowledge.

Practices to Better Productivity

The primary reason for having a service desk is to drive positive business outcomes. A healthy service desk promotes behaviors and activities that are geared toward achieving business objectives. Some of the best practices to maximize productivity are:

• Customize your tool according to your business: A service desk is one of the many aspects of an ITSM tool. Most modern ITSM tools are customizable which means you can do the following: create custom forms, create workflows that align with your existing business processes, create the perfect service catalog, etc. All these customizations will give you a productive service desk.
• Allocate tickets and tasks dynamically: Make sure technicians are assigned tickets and tasks after taking into consideration their workload so they can maintain their optimum efficiency. Motadata ServiceOps has the feature to show the workload of every technician.
• Adopt everyone-is-a-technician mindset: The department that is handling the service desk; everyone in that is a technician including the managers; everyone should get adequate training to handle customer queries. In the unlikely event of a ticket flood, an extra pair of hands is always appreciated.

Practices to Better Manage Metrics

Metrics help you to quantify the outcomes of your efforts. Having the right metrics steer you towards a better service desk, and the wrong ones give the impression that things are ok even though they are not. Here are the best practices with regards to metrics:

• You don’t need to report everything that you can measure: An ITSM solution is a complex software that works in mysterious ways behind the scenes for an average user. That is why it is important to start with a question before moving on to a metric. For example, if you are thinking that technicians are taking more time in resolving issues, then it makes sense to track something like the average resolution time of all technicians.
• Use both subjective and object measures: In case you have a doubt that the efficiency of the service desk is going down then you can use something like average resolution time to substantiate. But it won’t tell the reason behind the decrease; for that, you might require something like sentiment analysis. Here both subject and object measures play an important role.
• Be consistent with your measures: Consistent measures help you in building trends, which help to identify problems that might crop up in the future. For example, a trend line of tickets by category might give you the categories that require special attention.

Practices for Optimization

An ITSM tool, like Motadata ServiceOps, can streamline your service delivery processes so end users can get a better experience. Streamlining is done so you can deliver services faster. Here are some best practices that you should consider while streamlining.

• Leverage workflows to avoid queuing: A queue of tickets is something you should avoid because it hampers your average resolution time metric. Leverage the automation features of your ITSM tool handle recurring tickets so technicians can work on tickets that require actual attention. For example, ServiceOps allows for workflows that can send a predefined solution to common issues and even close them if required.
• Every ticket should have an owner: Accountability is important if you want tickets to be resolved on time. When a ticket is assigned the technician tries to resolve it within the time limit so he can maintain his average time. The auto-assignment is an inbuilt feature of ServiceOps which uses a proprietary algorithm to perform the assignments.
• Create SLA and escalation: An SLA is an agreement between you and your end-users that dictates the quality and availability of a service. An SLA also has escalation clauses that dictate what will happen when the SLA is violated. SLAs are important to keep your services on-time; Motadata ServiceOps has built-in SLAs to cover common use cases.

Practices to manage Knowledge

Effective knowledge management is the difference between self-service and long ticket queues. It gives you a repository of best practices and solutions that both technicians and requesters can use to solve their problems. Here are some best practices with regards to knowledge management:

• Technicians should participate in knowledge creation: Technicians should actively participate in creating knowledge articles in order to capture solutions to common problems. This will eventually instill a mind-set among technicians to treat the knowledge base as the go-to place to find solutions.
• Make Knowledgebase accessible to the requesters: Knowledge should be accessible to the requesters so they can search for a solution to their problems. Motadata ServiceOps offers an advanced search bar on the service portal so requesters can perform self-service.

Read about the steps that you can take to build an awesome knowledge base.

Conclusion

Having an effective service desk goes a long way in making your service desk efficient and reducing the overall cost of maintaining it. If you are struggling with your service desk, now is the time to switch to a better service desk. Try Motadata ServiceOps for 30 days free of cost.