How’s the Service at Your IT Service Desk?

For better or for worse, IT organizations have one very visible face: the service desk. Even if an employee doesn’t interact with other parts of the IT team, he or she has at least some dealings with the IT service desk, if only on an intermittent and (preferably) brief basis.

In many organizations, the relationship is intrinsically challenged. A typical interaction goes like this: the user suddenly finds himself staring at a frozen screen. He panics. He calls the IT service desk. In his mind, he is facing a mysterious malfunction he didn’t expect, can’t understand and doesn’t have time for. He needs a fix right away, regardless of the predetermined protocols and (overbooked) schedules of the IT team.

Day-to-day interaction with so many frenzied people means the service desk is exposed to significant end-user criticism and antipathy. Our research shows that being transferred, disconnected or put off with the promise of a call back from the service desk are experiences that drive deep dissatisfaction. And we know worker productivity is tightly tied to the services the IT service desk provides.

This is why leading organizations are looking for empirical ways to measure the effectiveness and quality of their IT service desks. A company needs to know how quickly and how effectively it resolves issues, and see the steps it needs to take to continuously improve the quality of the user experience.

Enter the Efficiency-Quality Matrix. By quantifying and plotting its single-call resolution rate and end-user satisfaction on the Efficiency-Quality Matrix, a service desk can gauge its performance and align itself with a unique set of actions for improved performance that will increase overall satisfaction and effectiveness.

Improving performance of the IT service desk may not cut down on the degree of panic that a typical user feels when he or she places that urgent call, but it will certainly achieve the more important results of enhancing user satisfaction and increasing productivity for the business.

Read my recent white paper, the Efficiency-Quality Matrix: How to Measure and Improve the IT Service Desk Experience. Or contact me directly.

About the author

Lisa is part of an ISG team that provides business-to-business satisfaction measurement and benchmarking. She has led more than 200 research programs for companies across a range of industries, including Financial Services, Manufacturing, Retail, Logistics and Hospitality. A hallmark of Lisa’s approach is that the insights she produces drive real and measurable change for her clients, rejuvenating and remediating supplier relationships in some of the world’s largest organizations. Lisa has a strong analytical capacity, which enables her to distil complex reports into succinct, actionable insight, backed by statistical rigor.