Service desk work is not meant to be creative.
This is something that I have preached for a very long time. In many cases, service desk work is repetitive and therefore easy to govern via process management, which allows us to become very effective and efficient at delivering service to our customers.
In my company, our processes are documented in written policies, procedures and in a knowledge base. For example, in my organization, if an incident’s resolution is not documented in the knowledge base, the incident is escalated to the next tier of support.
We don’t allow our agents freedom of creativity to guess on random solutions to resolve an incident. We’re supporting more than 3,000 restaurants across the country. It’s essential that each of them function in the exact same way so that when software updates are applied, there are no surprises from someone randomly making registry changes.
The backbone of our operations is our policy and procedure documentation. That brings with it the continual need to re-evaluate, change and adapt them to improve our service delivery.
From incident documentation standards to call handling procedures to our ever-changing and growing knowledge bases, there’s a lot to maintain. And it’s not just the responsibility of leadership; it’s a community responsibility. To assist, we have implemented KCS, as well as an “Inefficient Processes Committee.” These two things, along with the tenants of servant leadership, are our secret sauce to running a solid operation.
One of the features of KCS allows our agents the ability to call out when a knowledge article is missing or needs to be updated. Our ITSM platform contains an easy-to-use knowledge feedback loop function. Our agents use it constantly to provide feedback to our Knowledge Engineer, generally sending over one hundred requests each month his way. Without this critical feedback loop, even with regularly sending out articles for review, we still miss changes.
Our Inefficient Processes Committee, comprised of agents from all support tiers and leadership, meets monthly. Any agent can submit a process change based on anything that is holding them back from providing premier support to our restaurants. Whether it’s something that leads to excess handle time, a process that is unreliable, not fair, not achievable or makes a restaurant owner annoyed, anyone on the desk can raise a concern to this committee about anything and it will be reviewed.
The committee goes through all open submissions, assigning out action items with the goal of closing out anything raised quickly. Can we resolve everything? No. Sometimes, issues raised require involvement from other IT teams, senior leadership, restaurant field leadership and other third parties. However, we push everything as far as we can (and win on a lot). Then, we report back to the service desk team after each meeting, showing them progress made on all issues raised.
One of the most important things I’ve learned on this journey is the need to close the feedback loop. For example, if a submitted knowledge change is not adopted, our engineer still communicates with the submitter as to why (similarly, if the feedback is used, he thanks them for submitting it). Closing the loop confirms that the submitter was listened to, and when people are heard and see tangible results, they will continue to participate.
Processes are the glue that holds us all together and keeps us all in sync. Process management is a continual exercise to keep policies and procedures current, actionable and relevant. This exercise is not a leadership responsibility. Doing it right means that it’s a community responsibility.