How to harness the strategic potential of your service desk

I’ve always had a deep admiration for a great service desk. As I wrote in this SupportWorld article, watching a great service desk in action is truly a thing of beauty. 

Unfortunately, the service desk is often viewed — and acts — as only a reactive support function.

What many leaders often forget is that the service desk is uniquely positioned as the primary point of contact between IT and the rest of the organization, capturing valuable data about user interactions, issues and needs. When leveraged effectively, this data can drive improvements in service delivery, enhance user experience and inform broader business decisions, which transforms the service desk into a genuine business enabler.

The service desk has a gold mine of data consisting of these interactions, issues and needs.

The service desk is under attack

Yet, with all the good things that a good service does and represents for an organization, it finds itself being targeted by leaders seeking ways to reduce IT costs. Make no mistake, I do agree that IT costs should be optimized. What I am taking issue with is the rationale for reducing the costs associated with the service desk:

• All the work of the service desk can be automated: Routine and repetitive tasks performed by the service desk can and should be automated. However, there are many activities that can’t be addressed through current automation or AI capabilities. For example, complex or context-specific issues that require deep understanding of the organization to resolve are best handled by a service desk agent. Interactions that require high-touch and personalization cannot be managed through automation or AI. Issues with knowledge articles, such as outdated information or gaps in content, require human skills and expertise.
• Thinking that AI adoption will be simple: An effective adoption of AI capabilities requires quality data — and lots of it. Because of the push for AI adoptions, organizations are scrambling to formalize data quality and governance approaches. Effective AI adoption also requires a clear strategy, strong organizational change management and investments in upskilling.
• Overlooking the need for empathy: It’s humans, not robots, which interact with the service desk. When the consumer is faced with a challenging issue in the use of IT products and services, they need the empathy that the service desk provides to help address those issues. AI and automation simply are incapable of demonstrating and acting with empathy.

Perhaps these leaders are not aware how the service desk should be viewed as a strategic asset, not just a cost-cutting target.

Transforming the service desk to a strategic asset

What are some characteristics of a strategic service desk?

First, the goals and objectives of the service desk are aligned with business goals and outcomes, relating the work that the service desk does to business results. A strategic service desk asserts itself to break down organizational silos by integrating the service desk into end-to-end value streams. This not only drives collaboration across departments, but it also illustrates the critical role and contributions of the service desk in the delivery of value.

One of the most significant characteristic of a strategic service desk results from leveraging that “gold mine” of data to drive continual improvement and help inform business decisions. The data captured by the service desk provides the critical and valuable perspective of how consumers are using IT products and services.

Ready to transform your service desk to a strategic asset? Here's suggestions for some first steps:

• Be the advocate for the consumer: Give a voice to the consumer by representing the issues and challenges they experience when using IT-provided products and services. Develop use cases based on these consumer challenges for testing potential AI-enabled solutions.
• Lean into AI-related service desk initiatives: Be the subject matter expert representing all things service desk, while learning the “how” and “why” of AI technologies.
• Change the conversation: Instead of only reporting service desk-related performance measures, capture and report measures that represent business impact and results, consumer success stories and how service desk leveraged captured consumer information to drive improvements.

Introducing AI capabilities into the service desk is a good thing — it will relieve agents from the toil associated with those simple, repetitive, yet time-consuming tasks. But more than that, it will allow the service desk agents to perform the work that only humans can do.

Introducing AI to the service desk needs to recognize the strategic value of having a good service desk. Following the steps in this article will help service desks begin to transform from reactive support functions into proactive, strategic assets that drive business value.