Best Practices for Building and Managing Your Service Desk

Customer support teams regularly help clients with billing issues, payment concerns, order tracking, and subscription changes. These needs can sometimes be complex, but they pale in comparison with requests that involve technical issues or IT concerns. But service desk best practices can help with all this.

Service desks are vital in improving the user experience (UX) by providing extensive support for customer needs, including advanced IT operations. When built and managed successfully, they can boost customer retention, boost incident response outcomes, and result in cost-saving benefits.

What Is a Service Desk?

Service desks — sometimes known as customer service desks, support desks, or help desks — serve as a primary point of contact between a business and its users or customers. Service desks often use digital customer service platforms, trained support agents with relevant experience, and dedicated processes to handle complex issues.

A service desk’s primary purpose is to handle service requests and provide a structured communication channel for issue reporting.

The service desk prioritizes three key functions:

• Incident management: Uses clear processes to identify, assess, and respond to service disruptions or other significant issues impacting functionality. The goal is to ensure quick resolutions to minimize potential disruptions and overall downtimes.
• Request fulfillment: Handles and resolves user requests efficiently. This often involves providing IT support for multiple requests, including both simple tickets like assistance with changing passwords and complex issues like troubleshooting.
• Knowledge management: Provides self-service solutions through extensive product knowledge bases. These may include video tutorials, troubleshooting guides, and FAQ pages.

Building a Successful Service Desk

Launching a customer service contact center starts with building a strong service desk. This includes defining the service desk’s objectives, selecting trackable help desk metrics, choosing tech, and creating efficient processes.

1. Define clear objectives and metrics

Some service desks may focus heavily on IT issues, while others may offer full-service customer support, depending on the business’s needs and processes. Either way, determine how you want the service desk to impact the user experience and which key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to assess success.

These success metrics may help you measure the effectiveness of your service desk:

• First call resolution (FCR) rate: Tracks the percentage of issues resolved on the first interaction. If this score is low, it may indicate that customers may not be reaching the right agents or that agents may not have the training to resolve complex issues without follow-ups or escalation procedures.
• Average resolution time (ART): Measures the resolution efficiency, determining how long it takes to resolve a customer’s issue. Complex concerns may naturally have high ART teams, but you should track internal benchmarks to ensure they remain efficient without sacrificing resolution quality.
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores: Captures user feedback on service quality. Satisfaction scores are essential to ensure that customers are ultimately happy with the entire service experience and the final solution.

Remember to monitor these metrics both individually and holistically. If you attempt to lower your ART, for example, ensure that your FCR and CSAT rates don’t drop.

2. Streamline processes

Establishing effective processes ensures that the service desk operates smoothly. These may include the following:

• Leveraging automated workflows to route tickets to the right department.
• Developing and documenting standard operating procedures that provide agent guidance on handling common or recurring issues while allowing for personalized problem-solving.
• Using software that automatically assigns tickets to the appropriate help desk team members.
• Customizing your call center ticketing system to better manage and prioritize support tickets based on factors like issue urgency or account value.

To determine specific help desk processes that you may need to develop, map out your customer journeys. This can help you identify and address common pain points proactively.

You should also update documented procedures in real time based on new trends or urgent incidents that are likely to impact multiple accounts.

3. Leverage the right tech

There are exceptional tools available to help streamline your processes, provide faster responses to customers, and improve overall support quality.

Most service desks benefit extensively from choosing help desk software with the following functionality:

• IT service management platforms: Streamline ticket management and reporting for improved incident management and assessment.
• AI and automation: Automate repetitive tasks such as ticket categorization and escalation to save time and streamline workflows.
• Contact center integrations: Offer or integrate with contact center functionality for holistic, omnichannel support management.
• Self-service portals: Enable users to resolve issues independently through FAQs, walkthroughs, and guides as a first line of defense.

4. Invest in training

Agents directly impact how customers feel about their support experience. This is true whether they’re helping with onboarding new customers or addressing a concern from a long-time client. One negative experience can drive churn.

Support agents will be most successful in resolving customer concerns if they have extensive and regular training, especially when they’re handling complex technical issues.

To maximize agent performance, service desk management should consider the following:

• Provide regular training on all new tools and processes.
• Help agents develop or enhance their soft skills, including empathy, active listening, and effective communication.
• Frequently use both group and one-on-one training to address skill gaps.
• Use simulation and role-playing exercises to train agents in handling complex scenarios.

5. Encourage collaboration

Promoting internal collaboration can encourage teamwork that helps your agents solve issues faster.

You can foster collaboration by doing the following:

• Train desk agents on how and when to ask for help from other agents.
• Use unified communication tools to enable cross-team collaboration.
• Implement shared knowledge bases for consistent and accurate solutions.
• Establish clear escalation processes so agents understand when to escalate an issue and to which team member or department.

6. Focus on scalability

As businesses grow, so do your service desk demands. As a result, it’s essential to plan for this when initially building your service desk. You can do this by accounting for the following:

• Choosing scalable tools and platforms that may accommodate higher ticket volumes or increasingly complex customer issues.
• Implementing modular processes that allow you to expand operations seamlessly.
• Considering immediate and long-term business needs, including core functionality like AI and automation to streamline processes.

Managing a Successful Service Desk

Once you’ve established help desk operations and processes, you should implement ongoing monitoring for proactive management and optimizations. Let’s review the key steps to help you manage a high-performing service desk that exceeds customer expectations.

Continuous monitoring and feedback

Continuous monitoring can mean continuous improvement, making it a vital part of successful service desk management. It’s important to monitor the KPIs you set when building your service desk. Regularly assessing performance will ensure alignment with current goals and track performance.

Service desk managers should:

• Use dashboards to monitor metrics like ticket volume, agent performance, and CSAT scores.
• Collect customer feedback regularly to identify potential areas for improvement on team-wide and individual agent levels.
• Schedule regular review meetings to discuss challenges, share best practices, and provide ongoing training.

Leverage proactive incident management and alerts

Many service and software companies have service level agreements (SLAs) that are set in a customer’s contract. These SLAs may include performance requirements of the service or software itself as well as the support team.

Help desk management team members can leverage proactive incident management to minimize disruptions with these predictive measures:

• Using analytics to identify recurring issues and implement preventative measures.
• Alerting customers proactively about new measures and addressing technical teams for faster issue resolution.
• Prioritizing customer incidents based on impact and urgency.

Optimize communication channels

Customers may reach out for support across multiple communication channels. To meet customers where they’re at, your support team should do the following:

• Offer omnichannel support to best meet customer needs, including email, phone, chat, and social media channels.
• Integrate these channels into a unified platform for seamless communication in your help desk system.
• Monitor your customer experience dashboard to identify which channels customers value most and determine if you need to allocate resources differently.

Promote knowledge sharing

An updated knowledge base empowers both agents and customers, allowing for improved issue resolution. Multiple studies show that many customers prefer self-service options, with one study finding that 66% of users prefer them as a first attempt at issue resolution.

To boost the value of knowledge sharing, managers can:

• Update FAQs, guides, and solution articles regularly, especially as new and urgent issues emerge.
• Encourage agents to contribute insights and best practices that are reflected in knowledge guides.
• Create resources that provide in-depth solutions and advanced troubleshooting assistance.
• Ensure your knowledge base is searchable, in addition to offering a catalog of commonly asked questions for agents and customers to browse.

Ensure compliance

Service desk support agents must adhere to all industry regulations and standards. Insurance and health-care agents, for example, need to comply with HIPAA, and anyone working with payment processing must comply with PCI standards.

To best adhere to industry regulations, you should:

• Regularly train agents on security standards and processes to ensure compliance.
• Implement robust data security protocols to protect sensitive user information.
• Regularly audit processes to ensure compliance with frameworks like ISO/ICE 20000 or ITIL.

Benefits of a Well-Managed Service Desk

Well-managed service desks can offer benefits to everyone involved in issue resolution, including your support agents, customers, and your business itself.

For agents

Well-managed service desks can benefit agents in the following ways:

• Increased efficiency: Automated workflows and clear guidelines can reduce task complexity, making it easier for agents to resolve issues and reducing total work.
• Improved job satisfaction: Access to training, collaborative tools, and improved processes can enhance engagement, decrease burnout, and boost job satisfaction.
• Enhanced performance insights: Analytics-driven and personalized feedback can help agents improve their skills, potentially facilitating career development.

For customers

Customers may be the ones who stand to benefit the most. When they receive support from a high-performing service desk, they can enjoy:

• Faster resolution: Streamlined processes and automated workflows minimize customer wait times, delivering faster response times.
• Seamless experiences: Omnichannel support ensures users can receive help through their preferred platform for a stronger UX.
• Empowerment: Self-service portals or automated chatbots can provide instant solutions to common problems, reducing the need for customers to contact the service desk and wait for a solution.

For businesses

As the experiences of both customers and support agents improve, businesses can take advantage of the following essential benefits:

• Cost savings: Automation and efficiency reduce operational costs, while happier agents reduce potentially significant costs associated with employee turnover.
• Improved revenue and reputation: High service quality increases customer loyalty and retention while creating a strong brand reputation that can attract new clients.
• Scalability: Flexible service desks can grow alongside your business, ensuring that you maintain an exceptional customer experience.

Why You Should Integrate Your Service Desk With a Contact Center Solution

Contact center solutions can offer full-service support for all customer needs. Integrating your service desk tickets with your contact center interactions can provide your team with a complete view of all customer and user activity.

CCaaS solutions have omnichannel capabilities that can unify voice, chat, email, and social interactions in a single interface. Many leverage CRM contact center integrations so your agents can access a customer’s support and interaction history to better provide personalized service for each request.

These solutions also support collaboration among service desk agents with contact center teams, ensuring consistent and efficient support at all levels.

Why Nextiva?

Nextiva’s robust platform integrates service desk functionality with advanced contact center features, offering the following functionality and benefits:

• Intuitive, user-friendly interfaces that require minimal training.
• AI-powered and customizable automation to simplify agent workflows and reduce administrative work.
• Exceptional reliability with strong uptime and accurate monitoring and reporting for improved service quality.
• Scalable solutions suitable for businesses of any size and adaptable to fluctuating needs.
• Award-winning customer support to help businesses achieve long-term success.
• Transparent pricing with no hidden fees or surprise costs.
• Extensive integration options to work with your existing tech stack.

Discover how Nextiva’s contact center solutions can help you improve service quality, the support agent experience, and customer retention.