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Almost every organization is moving towards or planning to move towards digital transformation and IT is a significant part of it. The pandemic has made digital transformation a necessity to achieve maximum customer and employee engagement and satisfaction, bridge cultural and talent gaps, and promote IT as a valuable business process.
Since the service desk serves as a communications hub that acts as a single point of contact between an organization and its employees, business partners, and customers, it can enable effective and sustainable digital transformation that is customer as well as business-centric.
Before we dive into how service desks enable digital transformation, let’s first understand what a service desk is.
What is a Service Desk?
ITIL defines the service desk as the single point of contact between the service providers and the users. A standard service desk is used to handle incidents and service requests, as well as user communications. The goal of a service desk is to provide superior service to its customers within a pre-determined timeframe.
The IT service desk acts as the operational arm of any organization’s IT department, responsible for ensuring that operations run smoothly. Implementing an IT service desk software ensures that anything from small IT incidents to major system outages is handled effectively and that the service desk acts as a communication center that is a single point of contact enabling
IT users to engage with the organization’s IT department seamlessly.
Key Benefits of Service Desk Software
Below are five reasons why enterprises should implement service desk software:
- Seamlessly align IT with business processes: Service desks enhance collaboration and communication between IT and other business departments. The service desk software assists in the resolution and even evasion of preventable issues and breakdowns by helping in creating, assigning, tracking, and resolving tickets.
- Increase operational efficiency: Most service desk software follows ITIL guidelines to offer standardized processes. These processes help in simplifying IT operations, allowing for improved IT strategy planning, and tracking. Moreover, IT teams can set up usable, innovative workflows through the service desk to automate repetitive tasks to improve efficiency.
- Make data-driven decisions: Service desks gather and retain data from issues, products, and performance outcomes. This vast library of information stored in the software’s knowledge base can not only help customers, businesses, and employees save time and effort if similar future issues arise but also makes it easier to analyze and make better IT decisions.
- Boost productivity: IT teams can get the work done faster and more easily by incorporating some of the automated features of a service desk software. E.g., the auto-ticket routing feature helps in automatically categorizing, prioritizing, and assigning tickets to the right IT personnel based on their workload so that IT teams do not waste time managing tickets.
- Improve asset management: A service desk serves as a central repository for all the organization’s hardware and software assets, as well as any applicable contracts, allowing for quick information retrieval, asset assessment, configuration, and maintenance, among other things.
How will ServiceDesk help in Digital Transformation?
IT service desk software can enable the following critical functions as businesses begin their digital transformation journey for better customer experience management:
Using scalable operations to replace spreadsheet and email-based processes
When most businesses expand, they build operational procedures that are supported by basic tools like email and spreadsheets. As businesses begin their digital transformation, they have a chance to replace elementary procedures with service-desk operations that use automation, data management, and modern tools to offer reliable and quantifiable results.
Providing resources to users
For employees (remote or otherwise) to access the organization’s technological resources while maintaining suitable security controls, formal processes for providing access to technology and data resources must be implemented. Even though automation and orchestration capabilities often handle most provisioning requests, there can be exceptions and tasks that have yet to be automated. Using a service desk to manage and automate these activities ensures consistency of services and enhanced customer experience.
Assisting in the resolution of incidents that impact business processes
When an IT incident occurs or a change is planned, it almost always has far-reaching consequences throughout the organization. During a business-impacting incident, the service desk can undertake critical functions such as ticket triaging, assessment of impact, troubleshooting activities, and communication coordination.
Monitoring the performance of system and process
With its combination of humans, technology, and data, digital business processes have numerous variables that must all function together to generate successful outcomes. Service desks are ideal areas for monitoring the performance of these processes and systems for early warning signals of any IT issues.
Resolving data issues to gather insights
Management in any digital organization must be confident in the informational insights provided by IT systems to make decisions. The bulk of errors in digital operations is caused by data quality issues. Utilizing service desk processes for incident and problem management can help in identifying the root cause of these problems, so they can be prevented in the future.
What are the Key KPIs for Enterprises to Focus On?
Now that the business-augmenting potential of the service desk in the digital transformation of enterprises has been established, it’s time to look at some service desk KPIs for digital transformation that enterprises should focus on.
Tickets by status
By regularly monitoring the statuses of service desk tickets – new, open, pending, on-hold, solved, or closed, the overall performance and responsiveness of service desk operations can be tracked and measured. This helps make critical improvements and provides internal support that can significantly boost customer satisfaction levels.
Support tickets by channel<
There are more customer touchpoints than ever before in today’s hyper-connected digital world and delivering consistent performance across all the channels is critical to maintaining customer experience quality. So, tracking how many customer requests come across each channel can prove to be invaluable for any organization in improving overall support levels as well as determining which touchpoints require the most investment or attention at any given time.
First contact resolution rate
The first contact resolution rate (FCR) is the % of tickets resolved by the support team at the first point of contact. Addressing the customers’ concerns with fewer steps or follow-ups can enhance the service desk team’s efficiency and customer satisfaction levels dramatically.
Considering support teams must manage numerous channels and touchpoints in the digital era, identifying emerging patterns and developing informed strategies by analyzing first contact resolution based on various issues can increase first contact resolution consistently.
Average resolution time
Customers want their issues to be resolved as soon as possible. Customer satisfaction ratings can be hampered by tickets that take too long to resolve. Even the service desk team suffers if there are too many open tickets and disgruntled customers so the service desk team’s constant objective should be to reduce the amount of time it takes to resolve an issue.
Cost per incident
Insights into overall efficiency instabilities can be obtained by evaluating the cost of staff time and resources used per incident including overtime. This identifies trouble areas where the service desk may be wasting money without recognizing it, allowing management to find cost-cutting alternatives.
Agent utilization rate
Agent utilization rate, also known as occupancy rate, can help track the entire support team’s workload as well as the output of individual team members with complete precision. The utilization rate can provide a clear picture of what proportion of time the team spends on true support-centric activities. If there is a lag indicated in utilization, team managers can quickly diagnose the issue, provide training, or change their approach as needed.
Customer satisfaction
The fact of the matter is that retaining existing customers is less expensive than acquiring new ones, and industry data suggests that they are worth three times as much as a potential prospect. So the customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is particularly useful since it provides a quick snapshot of the customers’ overall satisfaction levels over time.
The customer satisfaction score (CSAT), which is commonly calculated on a scale of 1-5, can be used to measure how the customers view an organization’s approach to support. To increase the CSAT score, support teams must ensure timely responses and decrease average resolution times.
Conclusion: How ServiceDesk Helps Enterprises Achieve High KPIs by Completes Disruptive Technologies
Customers have the upper hand when it comes to service because they are the ones who get to set the terms of interaction. Due to this, organizations are welcoming digital transformation since it enables them to customize their strategy for their specific customer base.
If your organization wants to gain a competitive edge through the service desk, you must start thinking digitally. Going digital can provide you access to a variety of information about your customer’s challenges, issues, and concerns, that you can utilize to support them effectively.
Hopefully, this blog has helped you understand some of the ways you can make your digital transformation successful with a service desk.
Motadata ServiceOps offers a robust IT service desk with a built-in reporting module and customizable widgets to track various service desk metrics in addition to intelligent automation features and ITIL-aligned service desk processes. Begin your digital transformation journey with Motadata ServiceOps 30-day free trial.