I was recently talking with a colleague who has worked in the Service Desk / Support industry for quite some time, and I found it to be quite inspiring. This is an individual who is definitely very talented at his position; a managerial/planning IT role, and he had moved his way up and had previously worked and supervised several Service Desks.

During one part of our conversation, the discussion turned to discussions of some of the frustrating experiences we’ve both had while working Service Desks in the past. One comment he made left me quite thankful that, for his current employer, he no longer works at the Service Desk and doesn’t have to provide support to end users anymore.

He commented to me “I couldn’t stand those idiots who called in, usually late at night of course, and told me about some problem they were having, which could have been avoided by them just reading the half dozen or so notifications or warnings we’d sent them over the last two weeks.”

I can certainly relate; most of us can, actually, as I doubt there’s any of us who have worked at a Service Desk that have not heard something along these lines from a user, usually late at night:

“You have to help me, I’m running against a deadline here, and I need to get these proposal files sent out, like, yesterday. And now I can’t get into my email.”

It’s at this point we think to ourselves “Well, we sent several notifications that there was maintenance scheduled on the mail server and it was going to be unavailable from 10pm to Midnight tonight, and, lo and behold, it’s 11:15pm… and it’s tonight.”

And so we likely went into an explanation of this to the user, and perhaps the conversation got heated, perhaps not – it really depends on the attitude of the end user who’s calling. After all, we always react the same way to each call, don’t we? And we aren’t influenced by anything other than the situation at hand, right?

Of course we know this is wrong. And in fact, if our Service Desk staff think in their heads “I can’t believe this idiot is complaining about this, he was told a bunch of times the mail server was going to be down…” during a call, it’s almost guaranteed that on some level, this perspective will impact the call.

It’s a negative thought – justified or not – and it is a strong indicator that this particular individual’s perspective at the Service Desk needs to be refreshed.

They may be phenomenal support staff – from a technical perspective – but if we want to run a true Service desk, we need to provide service, not just support.

The perspective that this user is an idiot, or should know better than to call because of the notices that went out, or that this call is a waste of time, etc., is an Incident > Resolution perspective. It’s not a service perspective.

What’s the difference, you may ask? The differences are significant.

Perspective: My role is Incident Resolution

The Problem-Resolution perspective is one where the Service Desk analysts feel, or have been trained, that their role is to receive a call (or email), analyze the reported incident, and devise a resolution (or assist in getting the incident to the right experts in order for a resolution to occur). It’s a somewhat robotic perspective and is certainly efficient – and certainly results in a significant number of resolutions.

Unfortunately, it also leads to perspective that users who call in with non-incidents (like being unable to send mail when the mail server is offline for maintenance) are an annoyance or inconvenience. In this sort of situation, there is, in fact, no incident to speak of. We’re in the middle of a maintenance window, so no, you can’t send email, you should have read the notifications that were sent out all week, and there’s nothing I can do to help you because … there is no incident. Thank you for calling, send your email after midnight.

Now hopefully the Service Desk analyst doesn’t say it quite that way (although we all know ones who would), the call would end, and life would move on. The conversation with the user could even be one that was extremely pleasant, friendly, and left the user reasonably happy, even though their perceived incident wasn’t resolved (which is probably still frustrating to them).

Perspective: My Role is to Provide Service

This perspective is one where the agents who work the Service Desk believe that it is their role to provide service – not just a resolution – to the users who contact them.

There certainly are going to be calls where there is a simple incident > resolution approach. “Hi, can you reset my password.” is a great example – not much needs to be done here beyond a simple reset, being friendly on the phone, and then confirming the reset worked.

But the “my role is to provide Service” perspective is one where agents believe that they are not there just to resolve incidents. They are there to educate, to help, to resolve, to inform. Not just fix stuff. It’s about service, helping, assisting.

So for the user who calls in during the maintenance window and ends up encountering the “My Role is Service” agent is likely going to have a more fulfilling experience. The agent will have the perspective that they are there to help – by educating the end user about maintenance windows, telling them about the emails that come from IT and what to look for, and perhaps even devising a workaround to get that email sent out during the maintenance window.

The main reason that the agent is going to take this approach is because they believe that while there is not always an incident on the other end of the phone, there is always an opportunity to provide support.

So which Service Desk would you prefer? One which is out there to simply resolve incidents – or one that is actually going to provide Service, and wants to help? Which one at the end of the day is going to result in an overall higher level of user satisfaction, and a more educated and easy to live with population of users?

Of course, getting to this frame of mind isn’t easy. Over the next few weeks we’ll be going over methods for getting the Service Desk team into this frame of mind.

It isn’t easy – but the benefits are significant.