In 2010, TECO Energy, one of the largest energy and utility companies in Florida, faced a computing infrastructure of aging hardware and obsolete software that created stability and performance problems and hindered business productivity. Most of the company’s 2,800-plus desktop and laptop...
Tag(s): technology, practices and processes, infrastructure management, change management, process management
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
Over the last several years, HDI has collected information about technology use in the IT service and technical support help desk/support center. This year, for the first time, HDI has collected similar information for the desktop support industry. In this article, we will present the results...
Tag(s): technology, research, desktop support, service desk technology
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
Consider this example of a type of incident that most, if not all, service desks have encountered in the past, and probably will in the future: Mary, an employee at Bank of America (BofA), locked her Dell laptop with a BIOS password, which she then forgot. Without her password, she can’t reboot...
Tag(s): process, escalation, process management
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
As today’s organizations proceed with upgrades to Windows 7 and Office 2007 or 2010, many are finding that the action plans they need are very different from the plans they used for previous upgrades, with particular regard to the migration of users to the new applications. Of course, there are...
Tag(s): technology, change management, infrastructure management, release management
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
According to the 2010 HDI Support Center Practices & Salary Report, only 19.9% of all centers are offering chat as a contact channel. With adding value and reducing costs at the front of most IT leaders’ minds, is this the right time to increase your support capacity by adding chat? And are the...
Tag(s): technology, customer service, desktop support, support channels
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
Most businesses claim to use their customer service organizations as key differentiators in creating competitive advantage in the marketplace, but this claim does not withstand closer analysis. The service the vast majority of these companies provide is actually the same as their competitors, so...
Tag(s): customer service, people, process, business of support, practices and processes
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
If there’s one thing service desks are good at, it is collecting information and reporting on it. If there is one thing they are terrible at, it is being able to focus on the few instead of the many. But one way to find out if anyone is actually reading the reports you spend so much time...
Tag(s): metrics and measurements, people, workforce enablement, process, business of support
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
Once upon a time, customers relied on advertising to shape their perception of an organization. Certainly, some money was poured into customer service, but only enough to keep things moving. If customers had problems, their complaints were usually isolated to a strongly worded letter to the company.
Tag(s): people, customer service, process, business of support
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
The proliferation of mobile devices, increasing social and technical sophistication of the twenty-first-century college graduates entering the workforce, and anytime/anywhere demand for access have gained stronger footholds and show no signs of slowing. At the same time, the economic climate...
Tag(s): people, process, technology, desktop support
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
I remember the first time I encountered the term “managed services.” I had a tough time wrapping my head around those two words put together that way—to me, the meaning was not intuitive. And even though “managed services” has been in common usage for well over a decade, many people still...
Tag(s): process, practices and processes, desktop support
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016