Service Desk Industry survey reveals online support will have a major impact over next five years

April 7, 2011 - PRLog -- In an industry survey conducted by the Service Desk Institute and Cherwell Software 65 percent of service desk managers, that responded, expect self support to have a major impact on the business over the next five years.  Given that the top driver for self support was identified as budgetary, it is interesting to learn that less than 10 percent knew the cost of each self support interaction.

Almost 80 percent of the organisations surveyed are using Self Help or Self Service technology, but the survey made it clear that the initial focus has been on reducing call volumes and improving the user experience.  So the initial business case justification had been about reducing the amount of time support staff spent handling calls.

It comes as no surprise to industry expert of 20 years Tony Probert, European managing director at Cherwell Software, that a majority of service desk managers are still concentrating at the coalface end of delivery, when they should be increasingly focussed on the delivery of business services to the users. “For many organisations IT Service Management (ITSM) still needs to make a paradigm shift from help desk to service desk and now that there are the tools to make it happen there is no excuse.”

A good example of using metrics to promote business change has been made by Rosh Hosany, IT Service Desk Manager at a global investment management firm; “When an incident is raised with the service desk, a ticket is created to record the incident.  It has been noticed that approximately 30 percent of tickets are for issues that can be self-resolved by the end-user, so the service desk is in a strong position to make their case for self service on the basis of reduced call and email volumes.”

For those organisations with the technology in place it is important for them to look to the technology to optimise the user experience.  Key to this is defining the value expected from self service and enabling the use of metrics to track the costs of each self service interaction.  Once that has been done it allows for the systematic improvement of the service by measuring the effects produced by changes, enabling an organisation to realise the value.

“ITSM is not solely about problem resolutions and reductions in call times, it is about the delivery and integration of services to the business through IT.” said Tony Probert. “Organisations were quick enough to appoint a social media manager to manage and leverage the business benefits for competitive advantage, so why not appoint a Self Service manager to develop and drive the benefits of self service to the business?”

As well as reporting on the survey results the white paper provides an action plan for the implementation of Self Service.  For organisations doing this for the first time it provides a step by step guide.  For those organisations that already have the technologies in place it can be used as a check list to measure their progress towards a mature and effective system.

In Tony Probert’s opinion, the business and user landscape for the service desk could be remarkably different in as early as 2013 by; a) Increasing the provision of business services via self service. b) Every employee should be trained on the use of the self service portal, so they realise the benefits it provides to them. c) The business needs to drive the requirement, providing the budget IT will need to deliver increased business benefits and competitive edge.

The concluding comment about the survey goes to Howard Kendall, founder and chairman of the Service Desk Institute, “How long can other major organisations ignore the benefits of self-service when Amazon has made the front end of their business so customer friendly using self-service thinking and technology? This report reinforces the need to accelerate the pace of take-up to improve service and save cost.”

The online survey was sent to over 5000 IT Service Management professionals and conducted over two months in January and February 2011.  Service Desk managers were the main respondents and further detailed interviews were held to provide an insight of the answers given.  

Copies of the Whitepaper will be available to delegates attending the Service Desk and IT Support Show, Breakfast Briefing from 8.30am on Tuesday 19th April.  For the duration of the two-day show at Earls Court free copies will also be available from the Cherwell Software stand 800.

Ends.

Notes for editors

Service Desk Institute – www.sdi-europe.com
Founded in 1988 by Howard Kendall, the Service Desk Institute (SDI) is the leading authority on service desk and IT support related issues, providing specialist information and research about the technologies, tools and trends of the industry. It is Europe’s only support network for IT service desk professionals, and its 800 organisation members span numerous industries.

Acting as an independent adviser, SDI captures and disseminates creative and innovative ideas for tomorrow's service desk and support operation. SDI sets the best practice standards for the IT support industry and is the conduit for delivering knowledge and career enhancing skills to the professional community, through membership, training, conferences, events and its publication SupportWorld magazine. It also offers the opportunity for international recognition of the support centre operation through its globally recognised Service Desk Certification audit programme.

Cherwell Software – www.cherwell.com/emea
Cherwell Service Management™ is a fully integrated ITSM solution for internal IT and external customer support solutions, delivering 11 ITIL v3 PinkVERIFIED management processes. Its unique Codeless Business Application Technology development platform provides a solution that is 100% configurable, enabling customers to easily modify the system to meet their business needs.

Cherwell is committed to “changing the rules of the game” in this industry by offering more choices to its customers. Choice in financing (subscribe or purchase); choice in deployment (hosted by the customer or Cherwell); and choice in user-interface (rich-client, browser, mobile device, or Outlook integration).  All of these choices are offered in the context of a compelling value proposition – Enterprise power without Enterprise cost and complexity.

In 2010 Forrester Research cited Cherwell as being ‘an emerging leader of ITSM solutions’.

Service Desk & IT Support Show – www.servicedeskshow.com
The Service Desk & IT Support Show (SDITS) is the UK’s leading annual ITSM event attracting high-calibre IT service management, business support & service desk professionals. The exhibition hosts over 200 products and services from the leading specialist vendors, integrators, consultancies and service providers.  Alongside runs a comprehensive educational programme consisting of seminars, keynotes, interactive workshops, executive breakfast briefings, round table discussions and panel debates.

SDITS is at Earls Court – Tuesday 19th and Wednesday 20th April 2011.

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