IT Service Desk: Management Fundamentals

IT Service Desk: Management Fundamentals

No service desk runs efficiently without proper oversight. Service desk managers are key to effective tech support teams—and industry-proven methodologies and tools are key to a manager's success. This course covers the processes and tools new IT managers need to manage service desk staff and make service desk-related system decisions for the company. First, get familiar with different service desk staffing models and processes. Learn about the telephony systems and software—including social media management tools—that a service desk requires. Find out how to develop a system to ensure quality and define metrics to measure success. Plus, learn how to build important relationships with customers, within the team, and with other IT groups at your company. Instructor Fancy Mills has been helping technical support teams manage staffing and standard operating procedures for over 20 years. Let her help you develop the skills to manage your service desk and increase customer satisfaction.

Learning Objectives:

• What is a service desk?
• Understanding the different service desk models
• Staffing the service desk
• Training staff
• Mentoring and coaching
• Defining processes
• Reviewing technology, including telephony and management systems
• Measuring quality
• Building relationshipsresume auto scrolling
  Welcome
  - We've all worked in organizations that have poor processes and procedures. Or even worse, no processes or procedures. How does that feel? And how can you serve your costumers with no plan? Hi, my name is Fancy Mills and welcome to my course. This course is designed to help you grow and develop the service desk management skills that are required in today's age to be successful. Many of the experiences I'll share with you have been gathered over my years in working in technical support. I've worked with really amazing organizations that have implemented processes, procedures, and programs that have proven to be effective.
  We want to take these practices and determine how they can work for us. We'll be going over service desk terms, specific staffing considerations, processes, such as service level management, and incident management. And then we'll go into the technologies involved. And finally, measuring customer satisfaction. Building a service desk based on industry proven practices and methodologies that work is the best way to improve your service desk, team, and organization. I'm excited to walk you through the details, so let's get started on implementing strategies that work.
• What you should know
  - So let's talk about how to get the most value out of this course. First, this course is specifically intended for service desk managers including new managers working in a variety of support channels and centers. You might be working in a call center help desk, support center or service desk. You might be supporting external customers or internal customers or both. But all the functions we perform are very similar. This course was developed with all ranges of experience in mind. If you are a new technical support manager you will walk away with many skills techniques and strategies to manage service desks more efficiently and effectively.
  Experienced managers? You will able to refresh your knowledge and find new techniques that will help advance your skills. As you take the course think about your environment and how the content applies. Also, keep an open mind and think about how you can apply new ideas to familiar situations for better outcomes. There are some many great techniques that can apply for different situations. Technical support is not one-size-fits-all. The lasting value of this course is in documenting and applying the new learning content long after class has ended.
  So take lots of notes write down questions and think about your action plan for what you want to implement after class.
• Evolution of the service desk
  - The modern-day service desk as we know it is rooted in customer service history that dates back over a couple of hundred years. Think about it. When someone needed help in a village or a town years ago, they would have to get up, go to the store, or directly to a person for service. Now it may not have been technical service, but that's where customer service started years ago. The telephone was invented in 1876 and as technology has evolved over the years, so has our ability to provide customer service. Call centers were born in the 1960s with the ability to take incoming calls and provide information.
  It wasn't until about 20 years later, in the late 1980s and early 1990s that the help desk was officially born. The term help desk was coined by IBM in the 1980s, and it was born out of necessity. The personal computer, or PC, was being utilized by people working in corporations, and by home users, and they needed support. Well, who was available and qualified to support these new customers? As a customer, you either had to call the computer manufacturer, or a vendor, or just figure it out for yourselves.
  Internal organizations realized that the best bet was to have their own employees help customers, versus calling a third-party vendor for support. The challenge is that the most qualified employees to assist customers were typically developers or engineers, and they lacked the customer service skills needed to help very, very low-skill customers. Some companies started a catch and dispatch process, so that a customer would call someone, who would take the information, write it down, and then pass it on to someone more technical.
  In the end, both of these methods ended up being costly and inefficient. In the late 1980s, through the 1990s, companies realized the need to formalize a help desk, a group of individuals who would assist customers with technical support needs. In many organizations, these individuals didn't sit together, or really even work together. Each individual had their own special skill set, and only assisted customers in their particular area of expertise.
  Why share my knowledge with someone else when I am the expert? This knowledge hoarding attitude was very prevalent during this time. Individuals didn't share knowledge. The help desk wasn't a single point of contact, it was a group of siloed individuals that ultimately became another very costly, inefficient and ineffective support model. This led to the creation of a SPOC model, a Single Point of Contact help desk. This is where customers had a one-stop shop point of contact for assistance, versus trying to figure out who or where specifically to call for help.
  This centralized model required many companies to reengineer their processes, and hire the right individuals with the right skill sets to properly support their customers. In the late 1990s into the 2000s, processes and technology began to evolve rapidly. Help desks started to implement processes to help run more efficiently, looking at metrics like customer satisfaction to determine the effectiveness of the organization, and using technology like remote tools, the web, self-service, and eventually social media to expand support channels to customers.
  During this same time frame, the help desk started evolving into a service desk model. The service desk model started being adopted along with ITIL. Information Technology Infrastructure Library. A framework of processes. This service desk model included not only the ability to handle help desk issues such as basic break-fix issues, but it also expanded the scope of non-IT related requests, such as network monitoring. Today, the service desk model continues to evolve as new technologies and tools emerge, and channels for supporting customers expand.
  The service desk is looking at how to automate the process, providing even more self-service and even preventing incidents from occurring in the first place. Now more than ever, the focus is on running the service desk in an efficient and effective manner. It's got to be a cost-effective part of the business, while providing the ultimate reward to its customers: value. This brief history has introduced us to the inception of help desks, and how they have evolved into fully functioning service desks.
  In our next video, we'll continue our evolution conversation, and review the structures and models of service desks.
• Service desk frameworks
  - There are various service desk structures and models that are implemented all around the world. I'm often asked which one is the best. Well there's no best or right or wrong when it comes to service desk structures and models. It is really going to be dependent on the type, size, and role of the service desk within the organization. As we discussed in our previous video, the service desk started out as many separate individuals supporting technology. That individual support model has evolved into a single point of contact model that can be comprised of a variety of different structures.
  The size, scope, and breadth of support needed has changed dramatically since the 1980s. The service desk is defined as a functional group that receives and resolves incidents, service requests, and request for information. The goal for many service desks, but not all, is managing the incident through to resolution and the request through to fulfillment. This means that a service desk manages the incident and ensures that the customer is satisfied with the resolution.
  The key to establishing a service desk structure is to understand the roles and responsibilities of the support staff. There are many other considerations an organization will have to assess when determining a structure. What is the size and scope of the user and customer base? Who are your customers? Are they internal or external or include both? Where is your service desk located? Where are your customers and users? What is your budget? Is this a cost center or a profit center? What technology is utilized by the service desk? What supported technology is used by the user and the customer base? What are your service level commitments? What have you promised to the customer? What are the goals and objectives of the organization? What are the skills of the staff? Do you outsource any support functions? Some service desks have one level of support with technicians providing support to customers by taking incoming contacts, going desk side to resolve them and serving as an escalation point for each other.
  This structure is seen in more smaller organizations where the customers being serviced are local to the service desk. Implementing tiers or levels of support is a common structure for service desks. Tier levels can start at tier zero support and range all the way up to level four or even higher depending on how the tiers are categorized. Tier levels allow an organization to consistently trend, track, report, measure and calculate cost of support. The benefits of tiers or levels is that it provides these service desk an opportunity to route skilled staff, specific incidents or requests.
  It allows for quicker isolation of incidents and the ability to route and handle more efficiently and effectively. Tiers also open up the ability to easily categorize contact types, such as password resets and requests versus more complex issues that will require more time. Here are sample definitions of tiered support levels.
• Tier zero, self-service. When a user or customer resolves the incident or request themselves without any human service desk interaction.
• Tier one, the first line of support that typically starts the process, attempts resolution, and starts the escalation process.
• Tier two, more skilled technicians that can handle a variety of issues. They could be broken down by applications, products, skills or even customers.
• Tier three, specialist who specifically focus on hardware, software, and applications. They are considered subject matter experts who handle the most complex issues.
• There are also deskside or field support technicians. This is another tier of support that is engaged when support is needed at the customer's location. This could be in-house support or support that is outsourced.
• Vendor support. If an issue needs to be sent to a vendor, this is another level of support based on contractual and service-level agreements. Again, these are just examples as there are various levels and methods to structure service desk support depending on all the considerations we mentioned earlier.
  It's not as cut and dry as it sounds. As an example, some companies have broken down their levels and combined tier one and tier two support together in one role. In your organization, a tier one technician might also perform functions of a desktop technician. In our next video, we'll expand the conversation to investigate different types of service desk models you might build based on your structure.
• Service desk models
  - Now that we have discussed frameworks, let's look at service desk models. Establishing a single point of contact with skilled technicians handling and categorizing issues are all benefits of a tiered model. Another approach to supporting customers that promotes and fosters collaboration is called swarming.
• Swarming is a collaborative approach that calls for a true culture shift from a more traditional, tiered approach. With swarming, collaboration is fostered because there are no tiers. The process starts when an issue is not resolved at the first point of contact.
  An issue can be sent directly to the individual who has the most expertise to resolve it, regardless of level. The individual who is working on the issue is the one who would own it through to resolution. This is a relatively new approach for supporting customers, and many consider it the next evolution of support. Many software vendors who don't have the challenges of enterprise service desks have implemented swarming effectively. Many companies are looking at incorporating swarming-like strategies into their tiered service desk structure.
  And it's also worth mentioning swarming as an approach, even though it is relatively new, has many similarities to dev-ops practices, which are being implemented with more frequency and success. Now that we've discussed different models of service desks, let's look at common service desk types.
•  The first type is a local service desk. This type of service desk is located on-site or close to its users and customers. This allows for a more hands-on interaction with the customers.
• Next, we have a centralized service desk. This type of service desk is designed to support multiple locations from one central location. Support can be distributed from one location. And this type of service desk could also provide support to a local service desk. This brings us to virtual service desks. This type of service desk is not dependent on location. The customer may not even know where the technician is located. There could be multiple locations around the world and staff working from home.
  The goal is to still operate like a single, centralized service desk.
• And lastly, we have the follow the sun service desk. This desk expands on the concept of a virtual service desk and ensures that there is staff available to support customers no matter where they are in the world. An organization can have a virtual service desk in the US, Asia, and Europe, that would allow them to follow the sun and be available for customers no matter where their customers are located, or what time zone they're in.
  It's really amazing how many service desk models and types there are. And again, there's no right or wrong, or better or worse type to use. It depends on the considerations for the service desk and what the overall goals are for the organization. So now that we've talked about the evolution of the service desk, frameworks, and models, let's continue our discussions and talk about language, terms, and definitions that are used in the service desk industry.
• Definitions, terms, and language
  - We started covering terms throughout this course already, but let's go a little bit deeper and discuss common service desk terms in more detail. I've often heard that working in technical support is like learning to speak a new language, and there have been times in my career where I've had a conversation with someone and we were talking about the same concept, just using different terms. It's important to define key industry terms to fully understand metrics, information, reports, benchmarking surveys, and to determine what terms you want to implement in your own environment.
  It's also important to have consistency in terminology and language across your own organization. We started by describing the service desk as a functional group that receives and resolves incidents, service requests, and requests for information. This leads us to our definition of a function or functional groups. These are specialized groups of individuals who carry out processes. So the service desk would function as a group who carries out processes like incident management or request fulfillment.
  Service desks often function as a SPOC, which we discussed earlier, which is a single point of contact designed to streamline support for customers. So what is a process? A process is a collection of activities that are designed to produce a specific result. For example, incident management is a process that has to find steps, designed to resolve, recover, or restore an incident. Processes are made of procedures, which are step by step instructions on how to perform the tasks.
  These collections of procedures can be detailed in standard operating procedures, or SOPs. This can be a collection of many different types of procedures that are designed to perform the tasks in a process, document technical instructions, or detail daily work requirements. Procedures are carried out by staff who work in specific roles. Roles can be carried out by one or more individuals and are often defined in procedures and or job descriptions.
  An example of a role is a service desk analyst, service desk manager, or incident manager. And each one of these roles has defined activities and tasks that must be carried out in order to fulfill service desk functions. This gives us basic service desk terminology to start with. As we go throughout the course, we'll define more terms and concepts that are important to managing a service desk. In our next video, we're going to take the next step and look at people, process, and technology, and the roles that each of these plays in creating a successful service desk.
• People, process, and technology
  - [Instructor] No matter how much a service desk evolves and changes, there are three key foundational components that comprise a service desk. The people, the process, and the technology. These are sometimes referred to as PPT. These components must balance and work together for a service desk to run successfully. They also help to answer the how question. How do I create and manage an effective service desk? Let's start by looking at the people component.
  Sounds easy, right? You need people, that's a given. But what's difficult, is determining your organizational infrastructure. The people component, helps us to define how IT and the business will interact. The elements of people include: staff size, how many do I need? Optimization of staff: having the right people, at the right place, at the right time. Structure of the organization: this includes tiers or levels.
  Functional roles: what will people be doing? What are they responsible for? And culture: how does my staff influence and impact culture? Planning for communication, staffing, training, coaching, mentoring, engagement, retention, motivation, and professional development, are all additional elements of people's success. These comprise the elements of success for people, but without proper process implementation, the best organizational plan won't work.
  So let's talk process. Process is vital to ensure that tasks, steps, projects and changes are all carried out properly, as planned, by the business. Processes are also a prerequisite for implementing any tools and technologies. Your process helps to define your commitment to consistency, and continual improvement. Your processes should be based on organizational, and/or any industry standards that also align with the strategy of the overall business. And processes should also have the ability to move and adapt, based on the organization's needs. Rigidity in process management could really hurt a service desk. We must be able to move and change as needed. Process elements include: understanding you vision and mission. Business goals and objectives. Frameworks, standards, best practices. Governance and security requirements. Workflows and procedures.Critical success factors. Metrics. And satisfaction goals. The final component is where we will see the intersection of enabling people to utilize processes via technology. Technology is the integrated infrastructure that holds the organization in place, and enables people and process to operate more efficiently; saving time and producing more quality results. The sole goal of technology is to ensure that the established goals, related to processes, can be met.
  The tools and technology should be scalable, flexible, secure, and able to adapt to the changing needs of all stakeholders, including the business. These tools need to work together to create an infrastructure that fits for your organization. Technology goes beyond applications and hardware and software and the products that you support. The technology required for each service desk, will vary. But there are some common elements for success. Technology elements include: knowledge sources, collaboration tools, workflow management, reporting and analytics, process management, monitoring and alerting, auditing and reviewing.
  By focusing on these three main components, people, process, and technology, you'll have a holistic approach to running the service desk. This approach relies on a strategic mindset that first starts with a focus on people, then creating the process, and then finally focusing on technology that enables the business to run effectively. For the PPT trifecta to run and balance effectively, there needs to be a focus on business, objectives, and goals.
  There also needs to be a mechanism in place, to individually measure success of each component, as well as holistically determine where improvement efforts can be focused. Now that we've introduced the three building block components of the service desk, in our next video, we will go more in depth on the elements of success for each component. We will start first, with the most important component: the people.
• Staffing considerations: Asking the right questions
  - Questions that I'm often asked by students who are concerned about their future role in the service desk are, "Am I going to have a job in the next few years?" "What is this we keep hearing about bots and automation?" "Am I even necessary to run a service desk?" Well we don't have a crystal ball and our industry is rapidly changing, and more and more support is being automated and self-service is a key part of support for a service desk, but at some level people will always be the most important component of a service desk. People are not only the most important component of our service desk, they're also the most expensive.
  Anywhere from 60 to 80% of a service desk budget is allocated for the people line item. This includes salaries and benefits. Since people are the biggest expense, they need to be the biggest asset as well. Unfortunately in many organizations there are people that are more of a liability than an asset. When I work with companies that have people or staff issues, such as poor performance, low morale, and high turnover, I typically ask them a simple question, "why?" What are your current processes in place and where are we failing, specifically in the area of people management? So, let's get started and look at six steps to help facilitate successful staff or people management.
  Determining staffing resources ties in with your overall people goal. You'll need to hire the right people, with the right skill, at the right times to work. The challenges, how do you determine what's right for your organization? We are going to use the who, what, where, when, why, and how approach. We've already started with the why, which is step one. If you don't have proper processes in place, to staff, recruit, attract, train, manage, coach, and maintain your people properly, this will lead to poor performance, low morale, and high turnover.
  All of these factors will increase your cost per contact in that people line item we discussed in your budget. Let's discuss the second step, who am I going to staff? We started this conversation in our first video. Before you start to think about your talent and staff acquisition. You need to review your service desk model and type to determine who do I exactly need to staff my service desk? Who? Is looking specifically at the question, who do I need to hire for specific levels or tiers? Or do I need specific skill set due to a more collaborative structure? Do I need mixed tiers of support? Or specific tiers of support? Step three, is going to look at the what? What types of incidents and requests is the staff going to be handling? Does your service desk handle more incidents or requests? Or is it a mixture of both? What are the service-level commitments made in the service-level agreements, or contracts that state a level of expectations for our costumers? What is my budget? What can I spend on staff? What financial considerations must I take into account? Some additional questions to ask are, what are our response times? What are our resolution times? What are our handle times? What skill sets are going to be requires to handle the incidents and requests for our desk? Step four, we'll need to look at the when? And we need to start the process asking, are there specific time frames driving when? When do you need resources? Is this for full-time, part-time, contract, or project resources? And step five, where will our resources be located? Will this be in a centralized local office? Project-based working from a remote location? A technician that can be working virtually from anywhere? Where do I need to place these resources from a time frame perspective? The last step is the most important, the how? How do I know how many resources I need? How do I know how to determine this number of resources? In our next video, we are going to continue this conversation and start to answer the burning questions starting with the how and looking at our strategies for success.
• Staffing considerations: Data collection and methodology
  - There are many models that you can utilize to determine staffing resources. To start with, you'll need to look at the what questions, that we asked earlier. If you have specific service level targets to hit, like abandonment rate, response times and resolution times, you will want to investigate using workforce management calculations, processes, and tools, that will accurately forecast how to hit those targets, with the proper number of staff. Workforce management calculations include Erlang C, staffing models, and ratio models that take into consideration handle times, service-level targets, volume and arrival patterns of contacts, and number of users.
  Workforce management software tools can take these elements into account. In order to determine proper staffing levels to plug into a software or simple spreadsheet, you'll need to ensure you have the following data, that is correct and validated. Average handle time, or AHT, which includes how much time is spent talking to the customer, placing a customer on hold, and any after contact work. The formula for AHT looks like this, talk time plus hold time plus after contact work equals AHT.
  If you're at a multi-channel service desk, you'll need the average handle time for all contacts, inbound and outbound. Calls, emails, chats, walkup visits, pretty much any contact you handle, coming in and also going out from a followup perspective. You'll also want to know this volume per interval, that you choose, which will be based on your handle time. Once you have the incoming and outbound followup contact volume and average handle time data, you'll need to then collect data on total work hours required by your staff.
  So, how many hours per week, per month, per year, is your staff available to work? As a common example, 40 hours per week, working 52 hours per year, comes out to 2,080 hours. You'll want to adjust for your organization. This is just a simple example. Now the challenge is, is you really don't have staff available to work 2,080 hours, as nice as that would be. Why? Well because there is something called shrinkage, that gets in the way.
  Shrinkage is defined as the total paid planned and unplanned time away from supporting customers. Planned shrinkage includes breaks, training, lunch, coaching, meetings, projects, anything that you plan that takes them off of productive time. Unplanned shrinkage is what can really negative impact a service desk. This is the time that your staff is tardy, absent, leaves early, any time when they are supposed to be logged in available working, but they are not and they are not scheduled to be doing any other task.
  I want you to stop for a moment and think about shrinkage. We have to train, coach, mentor, and communicate, and give people time to use the bathroom and eat, right? We can't starve them all day and make them sit at their desk. So there is a certain amount of shrinkage to forecast and account for in your environment. What kills us is that unplanned shrinkage. Where are you losing time because of those issues? So, we have to ask, not only where are we losing time, but also, how much time is being lost due to shrinkage? It's not unheard of to a service desk to have 20 to 30% shrinkage.
  I have personally worked in a service desk that have had over 40% shrinkage. It was due to a lack of management structure, setting expectations, and a real lack of understanding on how important shrinkage is to the service desk. Shrinkage at high levels, not only hurts morale, it impacts customer satisfaction, and ultimately increases the cost of running a service desk. So, how do you minimize shrinkage in your service desk? 1.Calculate and measure 2.Train 3.Review processes 4.review procedures 5.Set goals and targets Remember, we are talking about shrinkage because you need to factor this into your people forecasting and staffing requirements.
  If you do not account for and calculate shrinkage, you may be grossly understaffed. You want to minimize shrinkage, as much as possible, so you are properly staffed. So, strategies to minimize shrinkage include, first training everyone on the concept of shrinkage and their individual impact. I can't stress enough, how important this concept is, to the success of a service desk. And I find so many organizations, are not focused on understanding and minimizing shrinkage.
  They are paying a big price for this unawareness, as well. So let's start with awareness and training. Next, you'll need to look at your processes and setting expectations around the unplanned shrinkage. You should work with your human resources on this next step. What types of human resource policies do you have in place, for tardiness, absenteeism, and calling in sick? The goal is to set expectations for staff and then hold them accountable.
  When there are repeat offenders, who are increasing negative shrinkage, they need to be managed properly. Many centers set availability targets, that set expectations for how much time a staff needs to be logged in and available, and how much time they are occupied and working. This is known as an occupancy rate. Which is the percentage of time, that staff spends handling contacts, against the available time, which is determined by dividing workload hours by staff hours.
  You'll also want to plan for shrinkage in your schedules and in your forecasts. If you do weekly training, coaching, meetings, and mentoring with staff, and you know that runs about four hours per week, per staff member, add that to your calculations. If you know that each staff member spends an hour a week on projects, add that to your forecast. Accounting for this shrinkage in forecast, helps to minimize the impact. Lastly, you'll want to monitor, real time throughout the intervals and timeframes we discussed earlier and report often to the team.
  Set shrinkage goals for your team. Make it a true focus on your service desk. Just like reaching a first contact resolution rate goal, or any other metric goal. In our next video, we'll discuss in even more detail, shrinkage, and the negative impact it can have to the service desk.
• Staffing requirements: Shrinkage
  - So now, after all this talk about shrinkage, we can go back to our calculations. Let's review what we've gathered so far. 1.Contact volume. Broken out by interval, day, week, month, and yearly totals.2. Total time of all contact workload, based on contact volume. 3.Average handle time of all contacts per channel, so our talk, plus work, plus hold time. 4.Our workload staff hours, total for the entire time frame. 5.Our shrinkage hours total and/or your shrinkage percentage, subtracted from total hours, and then the final step. 6.Take the workload hours required, and divide that by the workload hours available, to give you the rough number of staff that you need. Focusing on workload data for contacts and staff, calculating shrinkage, availability, and occupancy. Balance with service level requirements and targets will start the process of understanding what it takes to staff your service desk. Using this methodology, we'll help you have the data tools required for input, into workforce management tools, whether that is a spreadsheet or a more sophisticated software tool.
  If needed, it also helps to create a business case for upper management, that is based on historical data and business requirements. Understanding the staffing requirements will also help facilitate the scheduling of your people resources. The interval data collected will assist with determining how to schedule for your business needs, and this helps answer the questions that we asked earlier, around allocating your resources from a service desk type, and model perspective. Now that we have a methodology in place, for determining people requirements, in our next video, we are going to address how to develop a skills competency matrix to define those roles.
• Defining people skill requirements
  - [Instructor] Now that we know how many people resources are required, we need to manage the process for developing the skillset required in order to be successful. Sometimes finding the right people, feels like searching for a needle in a haystack, it's just hard. Well it doesn't have to be. I spent hundreds of hours sourcing, interviewing, and hiring people. And what I've learned is that setting expectations, creating a plan, and following a process, is really the key to successfully attracting and retaining the right people. I use the analogy that finding the right people, is like finding the right partner in life, you have to know what you're looking for.
  What is going to attract you to this person? What are your deal breakers? How are you going to manage and maintain the relationship? These questions are all part of setting the expectations, creating the plan, and carrying out the process. First we need to understand the role that an individual will be performing. This needs to be laid out into roles, responsibilities, tasks, and functions across all levels. This can come in the form of a job description, and by creating a skills competency matrix.
  Working with Human Resources, is essential to creating a job description that's a usable tool throughout the process. In my organization, we would use the job description as a tool, not just something we had to have in place to show a candidate every now and then. The job description should have elements, such as the job title, exempt or nonexempt position, salary, supervisor, reporting structure, work environment, required background for knowledge and education. These are all key basic elements of a job description.
  What we want to focus on to attract and recruit the right people, are the more detailed elements of a job description, which includes: essential functions, responsibilities, key knowledge, skill, ability, culture and experience requirements. All of these can be developed and documented into a skills competency matrix. The knowledge, skills, and abilities, often referred to as KSA's, are vital to detailing exactly what is needed to be successful in a specific role.
  What knowledge or area of experience does this role need to have? What is necessary? What is desired or nice to have? Do they have to have knowledge of a specific tool, application, hardware, or software? Do they need to be able to perform a skill based on their knowledge? This is where skills come into the picture. Skills are the ability to perform a task efficiently and effectively. We want to know that this person can perform the role as required.
  Desired skills in the support industry, can include: technical skills, customer service skills, problem solving skills, project management skills, and writing skills. Whatever skill you need performed, to complete a task, fulfill a function, or responsibility, can be defined as a skill. Skills need to be tested through the entire process. We can't rely on someone saying they possess a skill, they must demonstrate it, at the level needed for the position.
  Ability looks at the level of competence, that a specific behavior can be performed. Abilities are typically harder to assess, yet are very important. Someone may not have a specific skill or knowledge set, but what is their ability to achieve or attain a knowledge or skill? The ability to handle pressure, adapt to change, and switch between various tasks throughout the day, are all great examples of abilities that are needed for success.People perform at different abilities and it's our role to ensure that they have the abilities needed to succeed. Next, looking at the required environmental and physical elements of the position, is important. Job elements like traveling, moving from office to office, sitting, standing, manning a walk up center, all of these elements are important to attract the right talent and set expectations. Once all of these elements are developed, the next step is to document and define the characteristics for each.
  I recommend creating a definition for each, defining a level that must be achieved and then creating a way to measure and validate. Measurement can come through background checks of certifications, verifying education, asking interview questions, or requiring a demonstration of skills in a live or simulated environment. Any method your organization can implement to verify and validate skill sets, is key. Setting expectations, defining the requirements, and creating a process to develop a skills competency matrix, makes attracting the right talent so much easier.
  In our next video, we'll address learning and training requirements, for our people to be successful.
• Learning and training requirements
  - One of the biggest factors that causes people to become frustrated, unhappy, and ultimately leave the organization, is a lack of communication, training, and learning opportunities. Now that we've calculated resources, determined requirements, and sourced talent, it's time to train and educate our employees to perform successfully. During the interview process, if we performed assessments and analysis of current knowledge, skills and abilities, this creates a standardized process and allows us time to assess what talents employees bring to the table.
  This is an important input into the learning and training process, as it allows us to customize training for each individual. Regardless of skill level, starting people off on the right foot is very important. As a manager, you will have expectations for training and learning, and you will also need to be an active part of establishing requirements. As a new manager, it will be helpful to assess training with a consultant's perspective, to ensure that the proper training processes and programs are in place.
  There are stages of training that all employees will complete initially, and then stages that they will complete throughout their career. The first stage is the stage where they complete onboarding, or organizational socialization. This stage is important, as it provides all the training and learning requirements to become an effective member of this new organization.
• Stage of traning Development : 1. organizational socialization 2. ongoing traning 3. Mentoring 4. Coaching

So first, you'll want to investigate and familiarize yourself with your current organizational socialization stage. Some questions that will help to assess this stage include,
• how long is this stage of training?
• What specifically is covered throughout this stage?
• What are the detailed learning objectives, agenda, assessments, and evaluation materials?
• How will success at this stage be measured?
• The key components to be addressed in an organizational socialization stage include expectations, schedule, job functions and tasks, socialization to the organization, work environment, training and development, and technology and access.
  Using an organizational socialization planning tool and a RACI--responsible, accountable, consulted, informed--matrix will help plan and execute each one of these key elements. Now, the next stage is developing ongoing training after the initial socialization stage. This is where new managers in organizations can struggle the most, because it's vital to ensure that continuous training is implemented to keep staff skills sharp.
  We also have to train on any changes being made in the organization, and any brand new tools or technology or processes that are going to be implemented. Now, I mentioned that this stage can be a struggle. Why? Well, many organizations don't have or don't allocate resources to assist with full-time continuous ongoing training efforts for the service desk. So it's often up to the managers to develop and implement this stage. And this creates an issue if managers don't have the expertise, time, or resources. Which in my experience, is quite often the case.
• So in our next video, we will review areas to assist in creating ongoing training.
• Developing ongoing training
  - Now let's look at areas that will help in developing ongoing, continuous skills training and to tackle new training opportunities as well. First, utilize all the resources at your disposal. You may have more than you think or are currently using. Many organizations that I work with don't take full advantage or leverage resources that are available. As an example, if there's training that another department has implemented, can you license it and use it for the service desk? Can you allocate resources from another group to help assess and create training? Be creative, assess and use your resources.
  Here are categories of tools that will help implement ongoing training. Metrics reports, this can be from your service management system and from your ACD. Quality assurance scorecards from your formal quality checks. Informal quality checks of your tickets, emails, chats, calls, and knowledge articles. Customer survey or customer experience surveys. SOP review that is constant and based on your top contact drivers.
  What are your top contacts coming in each day, week, and month, and do you have training aligned to your drivers? Surveying your team to determine their areas of interest. Conducting a SWOT analysis to determine key areas of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Utilize your KSA matrix to guide ongoing training. For new changes, products, tools, customers, really anything new that is being introduced to the environment for which training has not been conducted, training will need to be developed.
  This training is vital to the success of the service desk. There is nothing more embarrassing than a customer filling you in on the latest product that you had no idea until just now that existed. I've been there, have you? So we have to ensure that any changes to an existing process, product, procedure or tool are handled with care as well as anything brand new. Your team wants to know, the why is this happening, the who is being impacted, what is my role, what exactly are all the support details, and when is this change occurring? What technicians tell me is that they want the facts and details in an honest and forthright manner.
  We need to create a training process that includes why is this change or new product, or tool or customer or process happening. Who specifically is involved from a stakeholder perspective? This is where that RACI chart can really help define responsibilities. RACI charting is a great tool that can help clarify tasks within projects, changes and programs. RACI clarifies who is responsible for completing the task, who is accountable, who's making decisions and taking actions related to the tasks, who is consulted, who will be communicated with regarding decisions on tasks, and who is informed, who will be updated and informed during the process of completing the task.
  What exactly does the team member need to know? Well this is where technical solutions, SOPs, work instructions, any and all tools necessary, to give the full picture of the impact. This also includes the where, which specific locations, or is it virtual? When is the change, new product, tool or customer or process happening. By creating training focused on these areas of a change or new implementation, we can start to increase the success across the board with a consistent, planned approach.
  There are many methods that can be utilized to implement successful training, whether it's new training or a change. And these methods can be tailored based on the training content, the student, and the type of results needed. Not all students learn the same, and adult learning is an art and science all to itself. One of the keys is to assess the learning style of your team and to simply ask, how do you best learn and how do you like to learn.
  Adult education training methods can include ideas like focus groups to discuss new content, role playing, video and computer based learning with the ability to start, and stop and pause at their own pace. Self reflection tools, blogs, podcasts, forums, any types of games where the interaction becomes really real and hands on. One question I'm asked frequently is how much time should I be spending in training.
  Well, there's no hard and fast rule for the amount of time. You'll want to assess your organizational socialization components across the board. It's not unheard of to have stages that last two to four or six to eight weeks, or even longer. A general rule of thumb is that for each week of this type of training equals a month to proficiency. The more complex your environment is, the longer the stage will be. For example, four weeks of initial training could equal at least four months to proficiency. For ongoing training, another target I see quite often is allotting at least one hour per week for training.
  And this could be a mix of different types of training including job training with a mentor, shadowing a technician in the field, self directed online training, coaching with a team leader or supervisor, or a manager reviewing quality information such as tickets and calls and chats. So there has to be a plan in place for how much time, how we are scheduling the time, and establishing meaningful learning objectives. Coaching and mentoring are two vital components of an overall training program.
  In our next two videos, let's take this training conversation to the next level. And discuss how mentoring programs can serve as a training tool and also how to set up an effective coaching plan for success.
• Mentoring
  - Mentoring is a great tool for training, socialization, and building teams. Mentoring is defined as a more experienced team member guiding and developing the knowledge, skills, and abilities of a peer. The mentor relationship requires trust, collaboration, and guidance for both mentor and mentee. In my experience in building mentor programs, what worked for us is to first assess the knowledge, skills, and abilities of each individual to determine who can become a mentor, and in what specific areas.
  What I found is that not everyone has the skill to be a mentor in every area. Our team members would also go through training with me that consisted of a two to four hour training session on topics like, what does it mean to be a mentor? How to foster trust, listening skills, and how to ask appropriate questions to guide your mentee. This training was required for all mentors and really helped to contribute to the success of our program.
  By using your KSA matrix that we created earlier as a guide you can start to create your mentor structure and categories. Mentor categories could include new hire buddies that serve as socialization mentors, guiding in all things organizational. These mentors are great to ensure that new employees feel welcomed and have a resource. SME mentors which stands for Subject Matter Expert mentors are also vital to a service desks. These SMEs can serve as technical gurus who help mentor and train up those who need skills enhancement.
  SMEs must be validated as an expert either through testing, assessments, or certification. One of the aspects for our program is that we were very deliberate to create a SME and training program, so we were consistently training up new mentors. We also rotated our mentors out every quarter, because the last thing you want is someone to languish or not gain new skills. I was at a client site recently and they performed a really effective mentor exercise related to SME mentors.
  We diagrammed on a chart their top 15 contact drivers, which included applications, products, hardware, and software that they support. We validated these categories by pulling reports of their top contact drivers. After we listed them on a chart we then went around the room in a round robin format, and each individual was nominated by their peers as a primary SME in a category and a secondary SME in another category. What I loved in watching this in realtime action was the positive comments, the teamwork, and just the fun everyone had with the exercise.
  The plan was then to skill up members to ensure that they were in fact a SME, and then for the next quarter they were going to plan to conduct a rotation of all categories. Primary SMEs moved up to a new category, secondary SMEs moved up to the primary category. This creates consistency and fosters learning new skills. Additional mentor categories that I've seen implemented in service desks include efficiency mentors, which includes training on how to use tools and processes in the most efficient manner.
  Liaison mentors, which are mentors who liaison to specific business units, customers, or groups. They not only mentor these groups with specific applications and tools, but also their peers on a better understanding of these groups and what they need. So as we can see, mentoring programs are a vital component of your overall training program. You'll need to assess, do we have the key components in place to start, or revamp our program? A key issue I hear related to mentoring is time.
  We just don't have enough time to mentor. Start small. Even if you can, just schedule one 15 minute targeted mentor session a week. That's better than scheduling no time at all. Also, keep in mind that chunking or microlearning, which are small learning chunks in five, 10, 15 minute increments, has been proven to work in adult learning. We have to as an industry start getting away from the mindset that training has to be formal, long, and boring.
  It can be informal, short, and exciting. And all those holes that we have just discussed will help you in creating an effective mentoring program. Now that we have a mentoring program in place, let's look at coaching. Coaching is where we as managers take a hands-on approach to training and learning to develop our employees. Effective coaching is a key ingredient to a successful service desk.
• Coaching
  - How many of you are sports fans or have at least watched a sporting event or two? Chances are you've either had a coach or seen coaches in action. Have you seen the coaches that keep their cool, talk to their players calmly and get the absolute best out of them? Or have you seen coaches that lose their cool, throw chairs, or kick dirt, or rattle their players so bad that they lose the game? Well, I've had both type of coaches, I've seen both type of coaches, and definitely only want to be one type of coach. The one that throws chairs, right? Of course not.
  We want to provide positive feedback, training and guidance to our teams. Coaching is a part of our overall training program. That along with mentoring, provides that extension to formal and informal training. It is defined as a interactive process of empowering team members to reach their full potential. Coaching can include educating, training, imparting wisdom, guidance, and encouragement to reach goals. While mentoring is peer to peer focused, coaching is leader to team member focused.
  Coaching is focused on setting goals, improving performance and developing skills. It's more action oriented and results driven than mentoring. So now that we've defined coaching, what's next? Well, the next steps are to develop an effective coaching program, which will require development in a few key areas, which includes organizational readiness, methodology selection, training, educating, practice, planning, tools, and scheduling.
  Assessing organizational readiness is the key to implementing or revamping a coaching program. These include quality relationships with the team, fostering trust, and commitment to coaching. Many organizations are simply not ready for a formal level of coaching and need to work on organizational readiness. Next, determine what type of methodology is best to implement for your culture. There are many different types of coaching programs out there, that are already created for you.
  That you could implement with training and instruction for your team, or you can create your own structure. Once a methodology is chosen, then training for you and anyone on your team is vital. You are in an interesting position because you not only coach, you may also coach coaches. So becoming proficient in coaching delivery is going to be a key part of your training, as you will be assisting others, through their coaching challenges.
  Training should include, topics like defining coaching for our organization, what types of coaching sessions are we going to preform, what's our methodology, how do we frame the narrative for the session, establish facts, and demonstrate metrics, how do we engage in a coaching session, establish norms, rules, action items, and follow up, also language is very key, including I statements, positive versus negative language, and body language.
  If your current training program hasn't incorporate these elements, now is the time to start. One of the most important elements is to create a coaching template to serve as a guide for developing and delivering coaching. I'm surprised at how many companies don't utilize some type of guide, because it just makes the process easier and more efficient. Even the best coaches still need a playbook and that's the function of a coaching organizer. A coaching organizer includes guidance on developing, the goal of the coaching session, what do we know? This is the, why are we having this discussion? Do we need any data or information? For example, metrics, quality scores, customer satisfaction surveys, training plans, any tools that can assist with framing the session.
  What are the action items we are requesting? Ensuring that we allow time for technicians to speak and ask questions. Then establish timeframes, determine resources needed, and when and how will coaching follow-up occur? These are all components of a quality coaching session that can be documented using a coaching organizer. Practice using the organizer will help adoption and consistency and performance. I've worked with companies who require everyone in the organization to utilize the organizer as a part of the coaching process.
  This is a best practice that I would highly recommend reviewing for how it could best fit in your organization. Lastly, the ever-present challenge of time and scheduling. Yes, we are back to this question again. How much time should I spend coaching? I'll give an example of our coaching culture and process, that can help us answer this question. Every day our analyst received a morning report and this was a snapshot of their previous shifts metrics, quality scores and customer satisfaction scores, if any scores had been measured on that day, and overall performance results.
  Our lead would take a look at each individual analyst's morning report, as well as their team's. They might find areas for positive feedback, quick coaching, like, great job yesterday Jose, on resolving 80% of your contacts on first level. Or, Bob I saw that that handle time was a bit high, let's chat quickly about that. So positive and performance improvement, informal coaching opportunities, were identified everyday. Our morning reports would roll up into a weekly report and our leadership, managers, supervisors, or leads, would coach each analyst formally, once per week.
  Again, coaching would include reviewing all the metrics, training, mentoring, project review, quality, customer satisfaction, everything related to that technician's performance, for the week. We typically allotted 30 minutes per technician, per week. This sounds like a lot, but I can tell you with 100% certainty, that the most successful and effective centers that I have worked in personally and have trained and consulted in, have had a priority focus on learning, training, mentoring, and coaching.
  These tools are quite simply the most efficient and effective way, to train, educate, guide, inspire and motivate, and most importantly, retain your people. We'll talk later, in another video, about building relationships, where we will focus specifically on customer and employee engagement, and retention. For now though, our people are hired, staffed, trained, mentored, and coached. Now we need to move on to our next main component, in PPT, which is process.
  How can we successfully develop processes for our people, to carry out. We'll discuss that, next.
• Defining processes and understanding their importance
  - [Instructor] So now that we've discussed our people component, it's time to move onto our next component, processes. Ugh, processes, it sounds so boring, right? Like those things we just have to do so we can get through the day. I've had managers and technicians tell me over the years, "Oh yeah, we do processes at our center. We don't need to learn this." And then I'll say, "Well, show me your processes." And the response I get is, "Well, uh, we don't have 'em documented." Or "We have it documented, but it's old and no one follows it." Well, my mantra is: if a process is not documented, it doesn't exist.
  If it is not followed, it doesn't exist. If it is not measured and improved, it doesn't exist. I have students tell me, "Wow, that's harsh." My response is, "Do you want to be a service desk with formalized processes? Or an ad hawk service desk constantly reacting, because we aren't for sure how to run our business? It's really up to you." Organizations have many policies. Some that are mandated by the organization itself, and many that are mandated by legislation, laws, or even the Federal Government.
  Examples of government policies that impact processes and procedures, and work instructions, are like the Privacy Act, FERPA, HIPAA, and PCI compliance. Compliance to a policy is the goal. As organizations can be audited and fined if these policies aren't followed. So a policy is a set of principles or guidelines that are set by a governing body, within an organization that directs actions taken in the business.
  Understanding what policies exist, what legal requirements are in place, and what the compliance guidelines are, are vital to creating efficient and effective processes. So let's now look at processes. We discussed in an earlier video, that a process is a collection of activities that are designed to produce a specific result. For example, incident management is a process that has defined steps designed to resolve, recover, or restore an incident. Processes take the inputs, like an event, I.E. an outage, and convert it to an output, like achieving a specific result, I.E. restoring service.
  Along with achieving a specific result, processes are designed to respond to an initiated specific event, or multiple events. For example, a printer has malfunctioned or an outage has occurred across multiple sites. These are events that would initiate a process. Processes also have customers, who are the beneficiary of the result or outcome. This can be defined for each organization. It can be one person, or a business unit, or an entire organization.
  Processes exist to provide a value to and achieve outcomes specifically to meet the needs of the business, stake holder, and customers. That's the main reason processes exist. Processes also have elements that include: steps, flow, and resources. The steps outline and describe how the process work should be completed, including the flow, what steps should happen, and in what order. This also includes allocation of resources, which could be people and tools.
  Who completes tasks and in what time frame? So as a manager, you'll want to ensure that key processes are defined and mapped back to strategic outcomes and objectives. Also, process owners for each process, will need to be identified, as well as determining how processes will be monitored, and improved, and by whom. We've now learned that processes have many characteristics and elements. The goal of formalizing our processes is so that we can deliver quality outputs to our customers, as efficiently and effectively as possible.
  We must understand applicable policies, which we discussed earlier, and create quality procedures and work instructions. Procedures get down to more details than a process. This is where we start to describe: what needs to be done, the task or tasks, who needs to do what, and by when. The work instructions are the most detailed element, showing step by step how to perform a task. Let's look at an example, of how to put all of this together.
  An organization has a policy called Customer Privacy Guidelines. These guidelines have a compliant statement requiring the validation of all customers, before providing information or support. A customer must validate their identity by providing specific information such as a password or ID number. Suppose a customer of the service desk has an issue with their password, and they are locked out. The customer calls the service desk. The contact to the service desk, via the phone, initiates the incident management process.
  There are 9 overall activities that must be performed in this process. In this process, the procedure of validating the customer, must be performed, and the work instructions with details, step by step, the procedure for how to greet and validate the customer. So that the service desk will be in compliance with the Customer Privacy Guidelines. Wow, that's a lot to think about, right? Well it is, but these definitions and examples serve to highlight why this structure is so important to implementing a successful service desk.
  Now that we have the basic process structure in place, let's detail specific processes and their value to the service desk. In our next video, we are going to dive even deeper into different processes, and the role they play for the service desk. So, stay tuned for even more processes.
• Overview of service level agreements
  - Have you ever contacted a service desk and received the runaround? Maybe you received an email that didn't make any sense, or you talked to two different technicians, who both gave you different information. And then only to have a supervisor tell you something completely different? I think we can all relate. The issue is many service desks have a lack of processes that are documented and followed. There are many service desk processes to review. We are going to use a common service desk scenario to highlight an overview major processes.
  Our goal is to use this example and illustrate at an awareness level, the role of each process in a service desk. So, our example starts like this, a customer is using a software tool and is trying to perform a function, and keeps getting an error message. After a few attempts, the customer starts thinking, maybe they should contact the service desk, but before contacting the service desk, the customer decides to go to the self-service portal to look and see if there's any information related to the error message they're receiving.
  Let's say that the customer does not find any specific information on their error message, and decides to contact the service desk. They search the service catalog while they are in the portal, to find out more information about software. The service catalog contains information around pricing, deliverables, support, ordering, request processes, and is managed via a service catalog management process. The goal of a service catalog management process is to ensure that service catalog is maintained properly, it has the most up-to-date, accurate information on all services.
  The customer reviews the support information in the service catalog, and decides to call the service desk rather than put in an electronic ticket. In the portal, they notice information related to the hours of operations, times for responding to customer issues and requests, and resolution times. The customer sees that for this software, there's a direct line to a service desk that supports this tool. Wow. There's a quick response time of 30 seconds the customer thinks. Let's call and see if this is really true.
  Hours of operations, response and resolution timeframes, and supported services are all examples of service requirements that would be documented in a service level agreement. The service level agreement or SLA is a contract between the support organization and their customers on the stated levels of service that the service desk will achieve. This SLA is managed via a service level management process.
  And the goal of this process is to ensure that the agreed upon levels of service are delivered based on customer requirements. This process defines, documents, measures, reports, reviews, and ultimately ensures delivery of the service level requirements. The customer is now calling the service desk, which remember, is defined as a functional group that receives and resolves incidents, service requests, and requests for information. And guess what? A technician answers within the first 15 seconds.
  Wow, that's great customer service and they've met their SLA service response time commitment. The service desk technician greets the customer, and starts the process of asking questions and validating information. The technician has now started to initiate the incident management process. In guiding an incident through to resolution, either working around an incident, restoring service, or resolving an incident, is the goal of any incident management process.
  Let's pause here, this is a great segue from SLA response time to incident management. In our next video, we'll discuss in more detail, the importance of incident management. This process along with managing requests, is vital to the success of a support organization. These are the top two processes that I recommend that a support organization start with.
• Overview of incident management requests
  - [Instructor] So now let's look at the two processes that I recommend companies start with, incident management and request fulfillment. An incident is a break fix issue and a request is a request for information, requesting a service or a change. There's nothing actually broken that needs to be fixed. Requests will be managed through a separate process that focuses on ensuring requests are implemented to the customer's satisfaction and based on service-level requirements. Back to our scenario. Now the technician starts to troubleshoot the issue, confirms the error message and categorizes this issue as an incident.
  The technician wants to confirm all the information related to the software. Is this an authorized software? For this specific customer? What's the licensing information? What version is the customer on? All this information can be stored in a configuration management database, which is a database that houses all pertinent information related to items within the infrastructure, like software in this example. The information that is contained in the configuration management database is managed via a process called configuration management.
  The goal is to ensure that all the IT infrastructure information is trapped and kept up to date so that it is accurate. All members of the IT organization can utilize this information, especially the service desk when troubleshooting. The technician searches the knowledge base, searches the web, looks at customer forums and knowledge sites and still can't find any information related to this specific error message. The technician has utilized the knowledge management process and now based on the findings, decides to escalate the incident to the applications group who manages this specific application.
  So, we are going to pause our story again as we have discussed six main processes in our scenario, and it's a good time to review. We've discussed knowledge management, service catalog management, service-level management, incident management, request fulfillment and configuration management. How many of these processes does your organization have in place? Are they more ad hoc or informal processes or are they formally implemented? Do you have your processes mapped back to policies and defined through procedures and work instructions? These are just a few self-reflection assessment questions to consider.
  In our next video, we are going to continue with our scenario all the way through to resolution. We'll add in a few more processes along the way so stay tuned. We'll want to see how this story ends.
• Overview of processes
  - Let's pick right back up where we left off. Our technician is working on our software incident from a customer. It was at the point of escalation after trying to utilize all the knowledge resources to resolve. The technician is going to escalate via the standard operating procedures documented in the organization's incident management process. For this particular software, since it's used for processing payments, the escalation SOP instructs the technician to escalate via their service management system and also to call the application support group directly.
  This SOP was written based on the service level requirements from the customer. Now that the incident has been escalated, the application technician who receives the escalation will now look in the documentation and review all the notes. While reviewing the escalation, the application technician realizes that a master ticket or what some might call a problem record has been opened within the last five minutes for this particular error message. This opening of a problem record indicates that this organization has implemented a problem management process.
  First, a problem is the unknown cause of one or multiple incidents. So, for this organization, they have received multiple incidents within a specific time frame that demonstrates that there is a problem in their infrastructure. The goal of implementing a problem management process is to discover what is causing problems to occur and to prevent them from reoccurring. So, can we find a quick work around to restore service, can we fix this so it doesn't reoccur, or do we have to keep utilizing the work around? These are questions that companies face every day related to problem management.
  Now that the problem record has been created, a team can start diagnosing the problem. This doesn't help the customer that is still having an issue with the software though, so what do we do? The customer will need to be given communication on the status update of the incident and what the next steps are. The question for many organizations is who exactly is responsible for that communication? This incident started at the service desk, right? Because it serves as a single point of contact. So, should the service desk technician contact the customer back, or should the application technician who is currently working on the issue? This is a question that many organizations wrestle with.
  And quite honestly, I've heard many heated discussions on this topic over the years. The answer is, your organization will need to develop your own answer and processes. For some organizations, they want the service desk to serve as a single point of contact for all incidents. For some, the application technician takes over at the time of escalation and handles it through to resolution. What your organization will want to determine is what is the best process to implement based on your service level agreements.
  Also, you will need to create detailed operating level agreement procedures as well. Those operating level agreements document procedures and work instructions for all internal departments that are involved in supporting customers. So wait a minute, have we totally forgotten about our customer? Well, while we were discussing operating level agreements and processes, our application technician was actually on the phone with the vendor. The vendor just informed them that this is a known bug in the new release of their software.
  Great, now they tell us. The good news is, they have a workaround. And the workaround involves removing the current add in and installing the previous version of the add in. All users and customers of the software will need to use the old add in until the new update is available. This communication will need to go out to all customers and users. A knowledge article will need to be created, and all of this information will need to be documented.
  There are so many other processes that are impacted by this one incident example. What is your change management process? And how do you implement changes without impacting the customer? That's the goal of change management. It's to minimize the impact to the customer when changes are made. I always joke and say change doesn't really change anything, they manage the process of all changes. In this case, it was our supplier, the software vendor's change, that impacted our organization.
  So we need to look at and report back to them how our business was impacted. This is the goal of a supplier management process, to ensure that all third party vendors, partners and suppliers meet the needs of the business. So we've walked through an example utilizing many service desk processes. We can see that these processes are not implemented in a silo, but have to work together to create a framework of interrelated processes for success. In our next video, we'll explore the components for creating a successful contact handling process, and use the incident management process as our guide.
  So stay tuned, our story is not over yet. Actually, now, it is just beginning.
• Process blueprints
  - Creating processes is easy, right? Any support center can do it. Well, it's not as easy as people think. I'm at support centers all the time and they tell me they have processes implemented that work, but upon further review and through conducting assessments, we often find that's not really the case. So what has happened to these processes? Processes are not a one time, create it and you're done project. They have to be defined, documented, managed, and improved on a consistent basis. Processes also have to have owners.
  If there's no ownership with the process, processes may not fulfill their purpose, miss metrics targets, and ultimately fail the organization. So what exactly does a process owner do? A process owner has responsibility and authority over a specific process. The process owner activities can include creating all the key elements of a process like mission, activities, goals, objectives, metrics, and measurements of the process.
  The process owner also has responsibilities for indirectly managing the people and resources related to the process. Monitoring, reporting, and improving the overall process is a big part of being a process owner. This role doesn't take over the role of other managers. It is in addition to management and works closely with managers across all organizations. So who are the process owners in an organization? Well, the answer depends on the organization and their structure.
  I've met process owners that are also functional managers in another area. It's up to the organization to define roles. This is a role that requires the owner to be uniquely qualified and have a skill set to meet all the stated objectives. Effective process owners are a key ingredient to overall service desk success. So no matter who owns the process, there are key elements that need to be developed, documented and managed across all processes. These elements create a blueprint for success.
  In this example, we'll walk through basic process elements and we'll use the incident management process as our guide. The goal will be to understand the elements and provide guidance in developing the incident management process at the same time. The first element is to start with the goals and objectives of the process. What is the goal of the overall process? And what are we trying to achieve? By answering those two questions, you will start to define the process.
  Definitions are a key part of a process as well. You must define the terms and language used by all. Next the scope of the process will need to be documented as well as any related out of scope items. For example, change requests, service requests, and projects are not managed by the incident process based on the definitions developed. And roles and responsibilities will need to be defined as part of each process.
  Examples include what we discussed earlier. What is the role of an incident manager and their responsibilities? Same for the service desk, users, customers, functional managers, and support partners. Process flows, steps, tasks and activities are the biggest component of any process. This process map and accompanying documentation lists all the roles, steps, and describe what needs to be performed and by whom. This is where the standard operating procedures and work instructions come into play.
  They are written based on a process map. Let's look at examples from the incident management process. So for each one of these steps, there has to be a defined role, responsibility, standard operating procedure, and work instructions for how to carry out each step and by whom. This is where the RACI charts that we discussed earlier can really come in handy. Who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed in this process. Mapping this out creates structure and alleviates frustration across the board.
  Some of the final elements of a process include reporting. What type of reports will be created? By whom and for whom? What metrics and measurements need to be recorded and in what intervals? Are there any policies that must be followed that tie into legal compliance or governance laws? Creating processes is not easy. It takes time and expertise. By following a structure and blueprint for success though, it can make the task a little less painful.
  Now that we have our processes in place, we need to focus on the technology that will enable our processes. In our next video, let's look at the final element in our PPT model technology.
• Technology overview
  - We've now come to our final component, technology. Often I here companies say, "You really just need good technology and everything will be fine." Well, that's just simply not the case. So many new managers buy into that way of thinking. I'm here to share that PPT is in this order for a reason. Technology should be the last factor. Why is technology the last in the people, process, and technology discussion? Does technology not generate value? Is it not important? Well of course it's crucial, but we have to develop our people and build our processes to determine how both components will be utilizing technology to enable the business.
  The goal of this video is to give us an overview of the technology that can be utilized in a service desk. When help desks came into formal existence in the 1980s, the technology we used varied from organization to organization. And by today's standards, seems really archaic. So, what did we have in the 1980s? Phones, desktop computers, pen, and paper. We didn't have any technology designed to really create a help desk that was customer or business centric.
  Technology has definitely evolved since the 1980s. And what we have in store for us in the future still remains to be seen. And, it's constantly changing. So let's focus on where we are now, the present. There are so many different components a service desk can implement. It really depends on the function of your service desk and what services you're delivering to your customer. Let's look at the three major service technology components that we're going to discuss in our next videos. Communication systems, including the ability to handle different types of contacts, including advanced features.
  Service management systems, including many integrated features and functions. And lastly, self-service systems. So let's get started on our technology journey. In our next video we'll start with communication systems.
• Telephony systems
  - Communication systems are at the heart of any service desk. We must implement systems that are going to provide a seamless single point of contact framework to our customer. Service desk support started with customers needing to walk in for help and then evolved into established centers that required a simple phone call. Today we have a variety of contact methods that a customer can utilize, including phone, chat, email, fax, web ticket submissions, text messaging, social media, and walk up visits.
  Your systems better be prepared for this multi method service delivery, especially if your customers are asking for it. How many methods do you currently have? So now that we listed support delivery methods, we need to look at the technology that can support this many methods. Let's start with the telephone. Telephony tools have been around since Alexander Graham Bell uttered the first famous words, Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you. Of course for us today, it's more like, come here, I need you to help me.
  There are many different types of systems that will integrate and unify many of the telephony features you need to run your service desk. The first system that we will review is what is commonly referred to as CTI or computer telephony integration. This integration can include routing features through an ACD, automatic call distributor, and it can also collect information through the IVR, interactive voice response. Telephony communication systems offer features called advanced routing which can be customized based on skill, product, or customer type.
  Advanced routing can also route any type of contact via queuing and distribution based on business rules, skill sets, or even service level agreements. It creates reports and metrics on all features, as well as any outbound contact dialer tools that you might need for contacting customers. Many of these telephony features are offered as cloud based services, which are scalable, software based services.
  This has been official as it reduces the cost and the overall impact to the business. And an additional benefit is not having to purchase and install hardware or phone lines. If your business needs to scale up for a season, launching cloud hosted services makes it so much easier. Tied into telephony, communication systems are collaboration tools. Collaboration tools allow your customers and service desk to utilize a suite of tools for communication and for service.
  These tools take communication to the next level. Which is true collaboration. These collaboration features allow technicians to connect, and support each other through various channels. The features and functionality of these collaboration systems are truly amazing. The challenging part is determining how to manage and integrate all of these pieces in your business. Social networking for internal teams is growing, as well as the use of social networking for external customers for support purposes.
  Many organizations are using social media tools for gathering information, sending updates, creating alerts, and sharing valuable information. For example, a company I worked with recently created an external Facebook page that has a link to their support portal. This is an excellent example of how to link customers to your support. The ability to use social media is going to depend on the functions of your service desk, your customers' needs and your technical abilities to capture information.
  Another support tool that can be used are remote collaboration systems. These tools offer the ability to connect to a customer anywhere and remotely offer service and support. These remote collaboration tools have dramatically changed over the years with features that can enable contacts to be handled quickly and on first contact. Features of remote tools include the ability to connect with a customer and edit registries, transfer files, chat, and view information related to software in systems.
  These advanced systems can also link customers to their records and information. The advancements in this technology have now allowed for integration with service management systems. So now all the information pushed, notes, videos and chats, are all recorded, and can be captured in the ticket automatically for the technician. The ticket is populated with all the information and data related to a specific issue. Surveys can also be initiated for the customer experience, and the technician experience as well.
  The key to successful remote collaboration is capturing the information in real time for quality and training purposes. Doe your tool allow for seamless integration with your service management system? This is an important question to ask and answer. Or, are you using multiple tools for remote support depending on who and what you're supporting? This is a really nice segue into our next topic, IT service management systems. These robust systems are really the heart of service desk technology.
  In our next video, we'll discuss these powerful systems and all the tools that can be integrated with them.
• Service management systems
  - IT service management systems are truly the heart of service desk technology. Just like the heart keeps the blood pumping to all parts of the body, the IT service management system keeps contacts pumping through all parts of the support organization. So what exactly is an IT service management system? Well some people still refer to these systems as old ticket tracking systems. Ticket tracking is still a part of the functionality of these systems, but now we can offer so much more. An IT service management system is a system that is used to manage all parts of the organization.
  The service management system helps to manage all services, including planning, delivering, supporting, and improving services. Many of the service management tools are built on specific frameworks and processes like I Tell, so these systems have embedded processes out of the box. How a service management system is implemented is based on several factors, including the location and scope of the services, users, customers, and where they are located, service level agreements, maturity of processes and procedures, and what technology is implemented in the support organization.
  From a service desk perspective, the service management system is the main tool we use for all services, including incidents, requests, changes, and problems. Every contact, interaction, transaction, and conversation should be recorded and documented in the service management system. This best practice standard of documenting everything has been around for years and is not going anywhere. We used to say if it's not documented, it didn't happen. And if you can't document, you won't work here.
  We provided the process and the tools by which to enable our teams to document as close to 100% as possible. Believe it or not, I still work with service desks who aren't even close to achieving 100%. Why does this happen? Well many organizations don't focus on the importance of documentation and some organizations don't quality check or measure the level or quantify the documentation. Some technicians just don't care enough to document it or it takes a lot of time, so they just blow it off.
  That is a key component of your service management system, ensuring that it is easy to document and navigate through tasks and functions. The biggest breakthrough in service management systems is the ability to now integrate process management, automate approvals, tasks, work orders, and enable not only incident management and request fulfillment, but also any other processes your organization is mature enough to manage through technology.
  Remember a process must exist first before technology can enable it. In our next video, we'll look at self service and how it can integrate into your tools for successful interactions.
• Self-service components
  - Let's talk self service now. So what processes can be enabled via a service management system? Let's look at examples using a scenario based model. When a customer has an incident to be resolved, or a request to be fulfilled, the customer can engage a customer facing knowledge base in the self service portal to look for answers and source the service catalog to initiate a request. If the answer is fulfilled via a knowledge article using the knowledge base, a record is created and documented in the service management system.
  If a request is made via the service catalog, the request can be automatically created and sent to the proper channels for approving and creating tasks and work orders to start the fulfillment process directly with those that need to be involved. The ticket can also be sent directly to the service desk to own the request if the organization chooses to do so. When you see the knowledge base for assisting the customer, the knowledge base can be housed as part of the service management system or a third party tool can be integrated within the system.
  The beauty is that we can create our own knowledge articles to key off of specific searches either by customer language, technical language, or both. If a knowledge article is utilized, it can then be imported directly to the ticket to show the resolution. It can also display searched information if the ticket is escalated. Imagine we have multiple incidents and we want to create a way to track all of these incidents, the problem record, and create a knowledge trail for root cause analysis and eventually problem elimination.
  Change management can be controlled via the service management system by evaluating and approving changes and submitting changes to be approved by the appropriate members. Analyzing and assessing risk can be completed before new changes are rolled out. Tied into the change management process is the process of release management, ensuring that a release follows a build and testing plan. Communicating release dates and changes, and sharing the information can all be part of an integrated release management process.
  So as we can see by these few examples, a fully integrated service management system can enable as many processes as your organization can handle. Now that we've given examples of process management, let's look at features of service management systems. This features list gives us a snapshot of some features that can be part of service management systems that provide robust options for service support and service delivery. From knowledge bases to mobile access, automation tools, integration with third party tools, to managing contracts, risks, to providing customers with self service, password reset and collaboration tools, we can see how the service management system is truly the heart and the hub of the technology infrastructure for support.
  I've often asked which service management system should I choose? Well the answer is not that simple. It really depends obviously on your budget, scope of services, maturity of your processes, and the function of your service desk just to name a few considerations. There are tools out there for smaller service desks that may give you great functionality, there are also tools out there for mid to larger sized service desks. One common mistake I see in the industry is buying tools with features that you may not need. So overpaying and not fully utilizing a tool.
  Another mistake I see is using a free tool but then spending lots of money to customize it. Often service desks don't conduct a full assessment on processes to fully understand their current state. I recommend to my customers, start with the current state assessment of your processes, then look at your current technology to map what is not enabling process improvement. Can you purchase tools or modules that can help enable processes? Many organizations just scrap systems and start over completely, and this can be a huge mistake.
  Be honest about where you are now, and the tools you have now, and forecast out new service offerings and growth. This will help you put together a great needs assessment and plan that you can take to improve your center. Remember, technology enables the processes, but your people and processes fuel technology. Without a full organizational assessment, you may be just throwing money away on fabulous feature and function rich tools that you will never use.
  Now that we finished our technology discussion, it's time to start focusing on building quality. And what does it mean to build quality? Join us for our next video and find out.
• Defining and measuring quality
  - Let's be honest. We hear the word quality a lot in technical support. It's a word that gets thrown around and talked about in service desks all over the globe. Our mission is to provide a quality customer experience. How many times have we seen and heard this mission statement? It's nice to say in market, but are we really defining and measuring quality for all of our stakeholders? Customers want quality. Upper management wants quality. And we as the service desk want quality. Each stakeholder is going to have a different definition of quality.
  Let's start by defining the concept. Quality is not what you do, it's who you are. It's ingrained in your culture. You either focus on quality, or you don't. I don't feel there's a gray component to quality. Quality is your focus to ensure that your processes, procedures, and programs that you build are operating as you have documented for yourself and have promised to the customer. Bottom line, is the service desk adhering to the internal policies and procedures established to meet the needs of the customer and the needs of the business? Let's go back to our, "We want to provide you with a quality experience." Think about how many times you have heard that in your personal life.
  Think about it. In restaurants, at the movies, purchasing products. Have we ever stopped to really ask the company to define quality? Or, is it some pie in the sky concept that isn't achievable ever. It's cool to say. But do we actually measure if we achieve this said quality? Is there a program in place that actually focuses on quality? So quality must be defined, documented, and measured. Quality programs have many goals that include, improving the customer experience, ensuring technician adherence to policies, processes, and procedures, identify trends that could impact the customer experience and the business, monitoring training trends for audit and compliance purposes.
  There are many positive benefits to implementing a quality, quality program. Where do I start with quality? That's the million dollar question. Lucky for us, we have an answer. It starts with defining your vision, mission, values, goals, objectives, and key performance indicators. What are the goals of your quality program and what is going to be our process to measure these goals? Quality programs must be consistent, accurately measured, provide inputs to all facets of the business, with a focus on continuous improvement.
  Let's stop here for a moment. Does your organization have a quality program for the service desk? If yes, what are your goals? If no, pause for a moment and think about potential goals of a quality program. There are a few fundamental components of a quality program that must be developed. Think of this as your quality program component check list. We want to have service desk policies, procedures, and processes developed to serve as the foundation for the quality program.
  Next, define the entire quality program process; program cycle, staff, monitoring schedule, scorecard calibrations, and feedback loop. Lastly, training and coaching processes to support and align with the quality program is vital. Quality is pride of workmanship. This is a quote from Doctor W Edwards Demming who just happens to be the creator of a much used quality improvement cycle called, "Plan, Do, Check, Act." Building the program using the components allows you to define, document, measure, and manage quality.
  There are many iterations of quality improvement models and processes. No matter the steps, cycles, or process that is utilized, the bottom line goal is to develop an effective quality process to ensure effectiveness for your entire support organization. In our next video, we'll use our quality components to serve as our guide through building the program. We'll start with the foundational element of quality, policies, processes, and procedures.
• Policies and procedures
  - So many organizations become extremely excited about building a quality program and implementing quality processes. The only problem is, if you try to jump and go straight to the check and act cycle without planning and doing, your process may not have much to measure. An organization must start with building procedures which are step by step instructions that show how to perform the tasks in a process. These collections of procedures can be detailed in standard operating procedures, or SOPs. This can be a collection of many different types of procedures that are designed to perform the tasks in a process, document technical instructions, or detail daily work requirements.
  Procedures are carried out by staff who work in specific roles. So what types or procedures do you need to develop? Well think of it this way. Any task, activity, steps that your technicians utilize to deliver service needs to be monitored for quality, and all processes need to be reviewed and monitored for quality as well. Literally every process, procedure, task, function, should be reviewed for quality. So that sounds a bit overwhelming and daunting, doesn't it? Well I won't sugar coat this or say that it's easy to implement process and procedures for your service desk, because it's not.
  But, it is necessary. So where do we start? Think about the current processes you have in place. All of these processes should be mapped out based on policies, documented with activities, procedures, steps, and tasks. That's where you will need to start first. If you don't have your processes documented, you'll need to go back to the beginning. Start with incident management and request fulfillment. For a service desk, a majority of our technician-focused procedures will be derived from these processes.
  These standard operating procedures become the basis for your quality program. This will all map back to onboarding and new hire training, where we are starting technicians off from the beginning with an understanding of what's expected, the work instructions on how to perform procedures, tasks, functions, and steps, and how quality will be measured. Procedures should be written with the step by step instructions on how to perform each task. These procedures can be grouped into different categories, which would then be measured on the quality scorecard when monitoring your tickets, calls, emails, chats, walkup visits, and site visits.
  No matter what type of contact channel is utilized, there can be a quality process created to measure it. Procedure categories can include contact handling, customer experience or customer service skills, technical skills, and documentation. Let's look at each of these categories in more detail. The contact handling category can include subcategories such as contact greeting, validation of the customer, gathering of any security information, expression of assistance such as, "How may I help you?" This subcategory also includes the closing and closing tasks such as verifying resolution, next steps, summarizing, asking if any further assistance is needed, a survey option, a ticket number, and a friendly close.
  The customer experience or customer satisfaction subcategory can include positive language, proper language, listening skills, demeanor, call control, placing a customer on hold, transferring a contact, and escalating a contact. Technical skills include subcategories to monitor such as gathering proper information, asking the right questions, troubleshooting, problem solving, applying the right solutions, verifying information, verifying solutions and demonstrating knowledge.
  Documentation skills include proper descriptions in the fields required by an organization, correct prioritization or severity based on urgency and impact. Utilizing the proper knowledge article solution and assigning to the proper work group. Developing procedures based on these examples of categories and subcategories will start the process of creating your quality program. Once the standard operating procedures are developed and refined, then the quality scorecard can be drafted and the formal program guidelines created.
  So what goes into the formal program guidelines for quality? Stay tuned to our next video, we will discuss considerations for developing the quality program.
• Developing a quality mindset
  - [Instructor] Before we can talk about creating a formal, quality program, let's talk about creating a quality mindset and culture. When you think of a quality mindset, what comes to mind? What would be some examples of a culture that incorporates quality? In my experience, the organizations that have incorporated a quality mindset, have a focus on documenting procedures on a consistent basis. It's not just management that's involved, it's everyone across all levels and lines of business that have inputs into the quality process. So documenting and updating procedures on a consistent basis, creating a program that's inclusive of all levels, and is encouraging of open and honest communication, is required.
  An example of this, is when information is missing from a ticket or work order, there's no blame game, or passing the buck to others. I see this a lot between desktop and service desk, or between desktop and other internal IT teams. Again, management has to foster a quality mindset and culture. Do you have the quality mindset needed to implement a formal quality program? If not, you will need to start there. Also, quality programs have to have an element of informal checks and balances that are a necessary part of the culture of quality reviews or performance.
  Encourage management to perform spot checks on tickets, contacts, and surface observe in the environment. These are all ways that management can keep connected to quality, without having to create formal documentation. Coaching, after informal monitoring, is a great way to positively reinforce behaviors and performance issues in the moment. Many organizations forget how important daily informal monitoring is, to the overall culture of a service desk.
  Informal monitoring, might be an aspect to tie into daily check lists, for supervisors, team leads, and managers. Taking time to pull tickets, review contacts, and surface observe, contributes positively to the overall quality culture. Another aspect of quality is allowing technicians time to self monitor their own interactions. This gives a technician an opportunity to self monitor, and self reflect upon their own work for training and quality purposes.
  An example of self monitoring, is when a technician listens to their own call, scores themselves, reviews documentation, and writes a report on how they can improve. This is reviewed with a member of management and doesn't have to be a part of the formal review process. In my experience, this time to self reflect and self monitor is invaluable. I've often found in most organizations, including mine, that technicians were much harder on themselves, and overall scored themselves lower than the Quality or Management Team.
  So think about how you could incorporate self monitoring time, into your quality program. Another informal quality monitoring opportunity is peer monitoring. Peer monitoring is conducted by allowing technicians the time to work together to monitor interactions and provide peer feedback. This could be conducted by pairing different levels of support together, different levels of experience, or by different products and services. This allows peers, to mentor and guide each other and build teamwork.
  There should be specific guidelines in place for the peer mentoring sessions, and they should be closely monitored to ensure there are no issues. Remember, the goal is to build skills, learn from each other and provide an additional quality learning opportunity for technicians. These methods of quality, can be classified as informal, as they are not often factored into the formal performance quality scores, which can be a part of bonus or compensation requirements. So think about what informal methods your service desk could benefit from, and what formal procedures would need to be developed to be implemented effectively.
  In our service desk for example, our goal was to review one ticket, one chat, one email, per technician, per day to spot check. We would also surface observe, and spot coach daily as well. These were on top of the formal quality checks that our Quality Team was conducting. Another informal quality method, is to include other lines of business, other support groups, and upper management in the quality process. The more you can get them in the service desk, listening to calls, looking at documentation, and really hearing what the customer has to say, the better.
  This Voice of the Customer Program has worked really well in many organizations. In fact, I had a customer I was working with, who finally got approval to purchase and entirely new, financial application system, after hearing how frustrated their customers were with the existing one. The service desk had been reporting on the dissatisfaction through customer satisfaction surveys, sharing metrics on types of contacts, and submitting ideas to improvement. It wasn't until an executive heard a customer actually crying on the phone, that it really hit home for the executives how poor the system was.
  Now, you my be thinking, that's a lot. I don't have the time or the team to be able to do that. You can set your own goals, timeframes, and process. There's no right or wrong or industry standard. It's better to have fewer monitoring sessions that are quality, even if they are informal, versus monitoring more, just to hit a target. I find that service desks do that, and they aren't getting quality feedback, just getting quantity. And what benefit does that really serve? Now that we've talked about culture and informal quality components, let's focus on breaking down and building the formal quality components to wrap up our conversation on quality.
• Developing a quality program
  - Okay, so you are ready to create your quality program, let's break down all the remaining elements that are needed for success. We'll use a 12 step process. Number one, define your process. Who is going to manage the process? What life cycle model are you going to use or what are the steps in your process? Number two, you need to identify your staff. Who is managing the process? Who will be monitoring for quality? Who will actually coach after the monitoring? There's no right or wrong here, it's based on your number of resources, number of monitoring sessions, informal processes, and the goal of your program.
  Number three, review procedures to ensure level of maturity. Are your procedures ready to become the basis of your quality program? If yes, proceed; if no, stop. Number four, build your quality components for the score card. What are our main categories and subcategories? What do we value? What do our customers value? What does upper management value. Stakeholder input must be solicited and utilized in building the quality components.
  Number five, once the categories and subcategories are built, then your scoring process and weighting will need to be developed. Typically score card forms are 100 points across all sections with categories weighted and ranked based on value to quality. If there are compliance areas, like validating information, that can be considered an auto fill component. Number six, communicate to all stakeholders the goal of the program.
  Why is this quality program being created? Solicit input across all stakeholder groups. Not including stakeholders is the biggest mistake organizations make. Include your technicians in the process. Have them help with creating components and weighting or ranking. Involve them at the highest level you possibly can while keeping in mind your culture. Include your customer's view of quality, as well as the view of upper management. Number seven, test the program.
  Listen to calls, review chats, review the documentation. How is the score card working with weighting the elements? Does it flow properly? Have we included all the necessary elements? Test for as long as you can to get the process defined properly. Involve other groups, and calibrate and compare the results of the testing. Number eight, document the entire program, cycle, process, components, scorecard, how calibrations will occur.The output of this step is that you have a quality program standard operating procedure that you can now use to manage the program and train on the program. Don't forget to document your coaching process as well. Number nine, train staff on the quality program. This includes all team members who will be serving as quality monitors and those who will be monitored. Also, think about how you will incorporate quality training for all future new hires. Number 10, pilot the program typically at least for a quarter.During this time, calibration sessions are happening weekly with all quality monitors. Calibrations sessions focus on bringing quality monitors and members of training, coaching and operations together to all review quality. Typically a chat or a call is reviewed and all members score the session. Standard deviation is then calculated and you want to ensure that the group is closely aligned with a plus or minus 5%. Part of the pilot step is conducting focus groups.Focus groups are held with technicians to gather feedback from the process. The key is to discover all of the components that need to be improved. Typically in the pilot step, we redefine categories and subcategories, change weighting, and also start to define the dispute process. How do technicians dispute a score and in what time frame? What is the process to dispute a score and what's the number of allowed disputes within a specific time frame? For example, once per quarter or twice per year.
  Number 11, implement the program. Pilot for as long as possible to ensure that procedures, scoring and overall process is working smoothly. Quality is not a program you want to implement quickly without testing. Nothing will kill morale faster than a poorly implemented quality program. Please take my word for it and don't find out for yourself. I work with organizations frequently who engage me to help revamp and fix their quality program.
  Once morale and engagement is negatively impacted, it's really hard to gain that trust back. And finally number 12, the last step is to consistently improve your quality program by review, calibration and input from all stakeholders. The key is to review and improve without making major changes more than once a year. Changing your program too often will result again in a lack of trust in the program, and that can impact morale.
  Creating a quality program is vital to the success of a service desk. It is part of creating relationships with your customers, and building up your team. Join us for our next video where we will go in depth on tools and practices to build better relationships with your customers and team members.
• Employee satisfaction
  - I want you to think about something for a moment. We've all heard the saying or quote about how you treat your workers is how your workers will treat your customers, right? Well if this is true, then why don't companies treat their employees better? Think about that. Pause and reflect on your current situation. Lots of companies preach about valuing employees. And swear that they measure satisfaction. But when I go in and host focus groups with different levels of management and workers, that's usually not what I hear.
  I also consult with companies who know they have an employee satisfaction problem, but it's so bad it's almost like they're paralyzed and they can't even move to try to fix it. Or they just ignore it or shift blame to the employees rather than look in the mirror. Now, do all companies act in this manner? Of course not. I've been in some amazing companies who really value employees and have effective programs in place to engage, motivate, reward, and retain their employees.
  Bottom line, the companies that are often ranked high in employee satisfaction have a few key components they do really well. To start, let's define key quality components for building relationships. Specific words like engagement, satisfaction, motivation, and retention and rewards are thrown around a lot. To build your program we'll need to understand what they really mean. First, what does it mean to engage employees? And just how to you measure engagement? Engaged organizations hire the right people, with the right skills to perform the right role in the organization.
  We've talked about this throughout the course. When you understand your core values, when you have a rally cry or purpose for your organization or team, and when you have a really good idea of the competencies you need, such as knowledge, skills, abilities, and culture fit, it's usually a win-win for both parties. I've said this for years, that if you hire the right people who are intrinsically and internal motivated, with a strong drive and desire to work for your organization, you end up focusing less time on engaging them and more time on rewarding them.
  Engagement is defined as the level of emotional commitment an employee feels to the work, values, and goals of an organization. Engaged employees are committed, loyal, collaborative, enthused, empowered, and focused on business outcomes. So can you measure employee engagement? Yes, you can. How? By designing employee engagement surveys that focus on trust, value, relationships, and collaboration. Not just on how satisfied you are with your work and pay and your manager.
  That's more the focus of employee satisfaction. Which is what many companies focus on measuring. Employee satisfaction is one level of measurement. Which is again, how satisfied am I with my career, pay, team, and management. Employee engagement takes it one step further. And focuses on not only the engagement of the employee, but also their connection to the organization. In our next video we'll continue our conversation on engagement and motivation, and talk about steps for success.
• Process for building relationships
  - Employee motivation is the individual desire that they bring to work with them everyday. Again, crafting your interview process to look for internal or intrinsic motivation is key here. Studies have shown that you can't really motivate by fear or reward longterm. The desire to succeed starts from within. If employees aren't motivated, they won't be engaged, and therefore not satisfied. This is where retention and rewards come into play. Retention is defined as the organization's ability to keep or retain their employees.
  If a company has high turnover rates, then your retention is low. In the service desk industry, you will have to research what has been historically tracked for your organization, but anything over 25% has been traditionally viewed as high turnover. This is where your rewards and recognitions programs can help engage and retain employees. But, just because you can have fun at work and give away prizes doesn't mean you will keep your employees motivated, engaged, and wanting to stay.
  So let's look at a few components that tie all of this together. Number one, first and foremost, hire the right people. I can't stress this enough. Take time, slow down, interview, observe, and conduct assessments on skill, attitude, and culture fit to hire the right employees. Think about your hiring process right now. Are they meeting your needs? If not, consult with human resources immediately to discuss gaps in the process.
  Number two, train employees properly. Again, slow down and take time to ensure that employees are going through proper social organization, new hire training, mentoring and coaching to build their skill level and engagement to the organization. Engagement is built starting on day one with onboarding, so what can you do to foster engagement from day one? Number three, mentor your team. Mentoring is a huge part of an engaged team and employee.
  I'm surprised at how many organizations don't have formal employee mentor programs. Everyone on your team can be a mentor and needs a mentor. That mentor is not you. You are a coach, it's a peer or team member who should be a mentor. Number four, coach your team. So many managers don't make time for formal and informal coaching. Set aside time every week for each member of your team. It doesn't have to be an hour.
  15 to 30 minutes is enough time to check in, review performance, and communicate. Stop making excuses and just make coaching happen. Number five, continuous training. This is the biggest complaint I hear from teams. We don't get any time to train, or we hear about new products when our customers do. This is the number one way to demotivate employees and create unengaged teams.
  Develop training plans starting from a 30, 60, 90 day process, and then branch out to different products, services, skills that team members must have. What is your time to proficiency? If it's say six months, then your training program needs to be at least six weeks, starting from day one. Number six, team meetings. This is often another engagement tool that gets left behind due to time.
  Again, stop making excuses and host regular team meetings. Not everyone on your team can make meetings. Do you have multiple shifts? Well how about recording your team meetings and post them online? You may need to hold virtual team meetings. You might even need to host multiple team meetings to accommodate everyone. Again, my rule of thumb is 30 minutes or less for team meetings. Host them every week, make them fun and collaborative. Number seven, employee committees, rewards and recognition programs.
  So often, managers think they must initiate these programs. Not at all. Get your team involved and create a committee to help focus on celebrations and holidays, and anniversaries. Conduct surveys to find out what the team likes to do, keeping in mind that not everyone likes the same things, and that's okay. Employee engagement starts with employee involvement. Number eight, continuous surveys and input from the team.
  Surveying your team consistently and reporting outcomes is vital. How often can you run satisfaction and engagement surveys? Can you perform a SWOT analysis, which is a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats survey. I recommend to organizations to run a SWOT every quarter and prioritize the results. Number nine, career pathing. This is vital to build a career path and training plan to advance employee careers.
  If your organization is flat, then you need to be creative and think of mapping internally as in interdepartmental career paths. Empowering your employees to advance their career is also one way to keep them motivated and engaged. Number 10, tied into career pathing is succession planning. This will ensure that your team members are prepared and trained to move into other positions in the organization, including your position.
  What type of succession plan do you have in place right now? If nothing, you need to start mapping career paths and thinking about how to incorporate succession planning. Number 11, last but not least is to listen and communicate frequently with your team. The best run organizations I have seen have incorporated all 10 of these components with a real focus on number 11. Listening and constant communication. So, which component do you need to think about implementing to create quality relationships with your team? Start thinking about what you need to implement now because the impact of engagement and motivation will be felt on our next stakeholder group, our customers.
  In our next video we are going to look at how to build and measure quality relationships with our customers.
• Communicating with customers
  - Now that we've discussed building relationships with our teams, the output should positively impact our customers as well. The key with building quality relationships is to first establish what our customers want and need and what we can deliver to them. This is all part of our service level management process we discussed in a previous video. So let's do a quick review. Often customers don't ask for service level agreements, we do. We want to ensure that what we are delivering from a service perspective is what our customers want first and in the timeframe our customers need it in.
  So establishing service-level targets based on our customer requirements that are documented in a service-level agreement that is managed by a service-level process is the number one key to success. For example, service-level targets can include targets like abandonment rates, answer time, service level, average handle time, mean time to resolution, first contact resolution, quality and customer satisfaction.
  By establishing these targets, we set expectations with our customers so there are no hidden mysteries when it comes to support. We now must think about our communication plans within our quality program for building customer relationships. Service-level agreements are a good first step in this program. We have to monitor and report to our customers our current status and service levels. Now I bet many of you may be laughing or shaking your heads saying, "Fancy, we do "communicate with our customers, but they don't understand "service levels, read our emails, or even listen." Well I will agree that that may be true, but think about how you're communicating with your customers.
  Are you just sending emails? I work with many organizations that just send emails. They're five paragraphs long with technical jargon, red font and words with allcaps. Gee and we wonder why our customers don't listen. So let's talk about ideas for how to effectively communicate with customers. For starters, think about sending less outgoing email and think about how to pull your customers into your organization for information. Creating a centralized communications hub is a great way to proactively communicate with your customers.
  This could be done via social media, within your tools like a self-service portal, or through other collaboration tools. Providing a one-stop shop for communication is great so that customers know where they can go for information. This hub is a great place for customers to obtain information on outages, changes, news services, and any announcements related to their service. Another idea along with the hub is to provide a mechanism for customers to give continuous feedback instead of just relying on customer survey information.
  I recently worked with a company and on their portal was a simple box that had kudos, complaints, and comments. A customer would click on whatever fit their need and type in additional information. This customer told me that this was such a valuable way to receive feedback and every customer was responded to within 24 hours. Talk about great communication! Tied in with a centralized hub and feedback box is the ability to report on metrics and performance.
  My advice is to keep this as simple as possible. What do your customers need to know? Many organizations post how many contacts were received, answered within target, how many were escalated, resolved on first contact, and customer satisfaction, and that's it. It's in a simple chart on their hub. Customers can access it at any time and no need to send emails. Another idea to improve communication is to host customer focus groups regularly, at least once or twice a year, or even better, quarterly rotating with various customer groups.
  This can be done in person or virtually or a combination of both. You could utilize survey tools administer a SWOT analysis or have prescripted questions that customers respond to. The goal of the focus group is to foster and build relationships while continuously improving service. It helps to bring in a meal or some type of incentive for customers to participate as well. A well-run focus group can be conducted within 30 minutes to an hour.
  So you don't have to spend a lot of time. Again, it's about reaching out to the customer and building the relationship. Another tool that has been effective and successful at building customer relationships is creating a customer liaison program. A customer liaison program involves a member of the service desk, this could be management, technicians, analysts, anyone who can foster and build relationships with the customer. In many organizations, the liaison sits in customer meetings, helps train on new tools, and communicates directly to the customer group on any changes.
  The goal is to create a relationship with the service desk by having a dedicated team member facilitate communication directly with the customer. A good idea would be to rotate liaisons once or twice a year so that customers don't become too reliant on one person or start to contact that person directly for support. Remember, this is not a support position. It's a communication liaison position. Now that we have a few ideas for how to better foster relationships with our customers, we need to look at measuring how well our efforts are performing.
  In our next video, we are going to review how to measure customer effort, customer satisfaction, and net promoter score.
• Measuring customer satisfaction: CSAT and NPS scores
  - Taking the time to build customer relationships takes effort and hard work. You want to make sure that the hard work is paid off, and that your customers are engaged, happy, and satisfied with your service. So how do you do that? By measuring and consistently improving on the service that you are providing. There are key methods to measuring just how our customers feel about the service desk and our service. We are going to look at three key common methods that service desks utilize to measure just how customers are rating service and performance.
  The first step is to determine exactly what do you want to measure? Is it overall satisfaction with the service desk performance? Is it a specific product or service? Do you want to measure how well a project or a roll-out went? Or is it the specific performance of a specific technician? Is it related to the speed of a service or if a customer will purchase a product again. Once you determine specifically what you want to measure, you can then determine the best method to utilize, or perhaps use a combination of methods.
  The three methods we will review are customer satisfaction, net promoter score, and customer effort. Let's start with customer satisfaction. This type of survey is traditionally the most common method for customers to give feedback. It's usually based on a scale of one to five, one to ten, a happy to sad emoji, or very unsatisfied to very satisfied. This survey can be short, just a few questions, and administered in a variety of ways. This makes it easy to administer and calculate results, which is why it is commonly used.Many service desks use this type of survey at the end of a contact or the closure of an instant or request to determine their satisfaction with the overall service, technician, and product. The advantage is you can ask a few questions on a variety of topics. The disadvantage is that the survey is just focused on that one instant or request, and doesn't dig any deeper. So for that level of valuation it works great. Questions that could be included on a customer satisfaction survey include: rate your overall experience with the service desk, how satisfied are you with the level of service you received, and how would you rate the timeliness of the service? These types of customer satisfaction questions are focused on the specific topic and are short-term focused.
  If you were looking for a measurement that is more focused on the long-term engagement level of your customer, the net promoter score is an option to assess. Net promoter score, or NPS, was introduced in the early 2000's and focuses on loyalty. Specifically, would you recommend a product or service, or would you use or buy our product or service again? For internal service desks who have a captive audience, meaning your customers really don't have another support option other than going underground or calling a friend, NPS may not be the best survey option.
  For externally-facing centers with competition, NPS is a great tool. NPS looks at loyalty to a company or a product and also aligns with development and growth of the service desk performance. Net promoter score scores on a scale from one to ten and focuses on the scores given by promoters and detractors. Examples of NPS questions include: how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or family member, and what is the likelihood you will recommend our product in the future? The advantage to NPS are that you can measure the overall customer experience across the board.
  It is not just focused on one incident or transaction. Since it is more long-term focused, it doesn't focus on the result of a specific closed incident or request. The disadvantages are that you may not know specifically why a customer is a detractor unless you ask additional questions. So you may know that a customer is a promoter, but why? Or a detractor, but why? Unless you ask for additional information via follow-up questions, you'll have the data but no additional information on how to correct or improve negative situations or how to reward or recognize positive situations.
  Lastly and importantly, just because a customer is a promoter and happy with the service doesn't necessarily mean they are loyal and going to recommend your product and services. So, unless you have a really specific referral program or ways to tie loyalty to NPS scores, you may not know the true level of engagement and loyalty. In our next video, we will look at another method that focuses on how much effort a customer took to receive support, the customer effort score.
• Customer effort score (CES)
  - Now that we've looked at customer satisfaction and net promoter score, let's look at another method called Customer Effort Score. The theory around customer effort is that loyalty is created by reducing the effort it takes to give a customer support and by making it easier for customers to receive service. Customer effort is usually based on a strongly disagree to strongly agree scale. It focuses on how easy or how much effort a customer had to expend to receive service. Higher scores equal lower effort, lower scores equal a higher effort.
  The first version of customer effort questions asked how much effort did you have to put forth to handle your issue. Newer versions of customer effort questions focus on questions like did the service desk make it easy for me to handle my issue. The goal of customer effort is focus on assessing how easy it was for the customer to get service from their perspective, and how this can build loyalty. So, to summarize let's look at examples of each type of question we've covered.
  Customer satisfaction looks at how satisfied were you with the service you received. Net promoter score wants to know how likely are you to refer us to a college or friend. And customer effort wants to know how easy was it for you to handle your issue. There's a lot of talk and some would say even debate in our industry about which survey tool to use. Which one is more statistically valid? And which one is most effective? The good news is you don't have to choose.
  You can utilize the types of questions that work best for your organization. For example, I work many companies who include one NPS question in their customer satisfaction survey, and measure the results of that one question separately from satisfaction. So now that we have a better understanding of customer survey methods, you can think about how they fit in your organization, and no matter what tool you use, the key is to consistently survey your customers, compile the results, and continuously improve your service.
  In our next video, we are going to look at how support teams play a role in our overall customer satisfaction, and how to build those relationships as well.
• Interacting with other IT groups
  - Okay, we've discussed building and measuring relationships with our customers. Now we must continue the conversation to building relationships with other IT teams. Let's focus on building those agreements and relationships within our own organization. We have to take what our customers want and what we can deliver and expand that to our support teams because realistically we aren't going to be able to handle every customer issue, incident, and request ourselves. We're going to have to escalate incidents and have requests fulfilled by other teams.
  These groups must understand the service-level agreements, what customers want, and we as a support organization have to build operating-level agreements. operating-level agreements internally establish what we must deliver to meet the service level agreements. In a perfect world, we would already have these agreements established with other groups and life would be easy. Well, this is the real world. We have to work on building these agreements and relationships.
  Operating-level agreements are the levels of service and agreements on how each of the groups will respond and work together in delivering service. Operating-level agreements are the number one tool to document our processes, procedures, and what we will be accountable for. Although operating-level agreements are a good first step in this program, we should also hold groups accountable for meeting and not meeting our stated levels of service. Operating-level agreements include roles, responsibilities, incident handling procedures for all types of incidents, escalation handling procedures, documentation procedures, reporting structure and metrics just to name a few categories.
  The challenge for many organizations is that they don't have these components created for their own teams so it makes it hard to collectively agree upon them. OLAs should be the first step to document these components and gain agreement across the board. These agreements along with breach protocols need to be enforced by the highest level possible in an organization. Now that we have discussed the most important tool for building relationships, let's look at other factors.
  There are three key components to creating and fostering relationships with other teams. Communication, mentoring, job shadowing, sharing and rotations. First is communication. This sounds like a no brainer, right? Of course you need to communicate. But I work with so many service organizations and the lack of communication between teams is really shocking. These groups are in silos. They don't meet, pick up the phone to talk, or work with each other in any way.
  And this starts from the top down and with you. So how can we build better teams across the board? Well, start communicating better. Let's look at some communication ideas. First, team meetings. Can you share the information from each individual team with all of the other teams to stay connected and updated? This will help to build communication on what each team is working on. Do you meet with managers from the other groups? If not, I would start immediately.
  Many organizations I work with start each day with a cross-functional manager meeting to go over statistics from the previous day, review changes, open tickets, and discuss projects. This happens every day and the information is communicated to the teams. Do you have a centralized communication's hub or portal where all of this information is shared? Do you have a chat tool that everyone utilizes throughout the day to ask and answer questions? This is a huge communication tool that is effective in many organizations.
  The opportunity to chat and video chat really builds teams. Issue management. How do you manage and communicate issues with incidents, work orders, requests, problems and changes? Does your team just send tickets back to the service desk and say, "This is horrible, gather more information." What if the service desk didn't gather enough information? Or the information is wrong or perhaps the ticket was incorrectly escalated or prioritized? What is your process to handle these types of issues? What I see in many companies is just that they push it back to the service desk and a ticket just sits there while the customer service clock is ticking.
  Then a war breaks out on who is right and who's wrong. You need to determine what a quality ticket looks like, train on how to follow quality procedures, and create a process for what to do when it's not followed. A recommendation based on what I see in the industry is for a technician to flag the information as that's wrong, make notes in the system and keep working a ticket. That information will go to a manager who can then address it properly. Take technicians out of the loop and handle it at a management level.
  Building a process like this saves time, money, and builds better relationships. Lastly, to build relationships, let other teams work together and job shadow, job share, and rotate whenever possible. A big issue is that many other groups don't even realize what it's like to work on a service desk or they came from the service desk and forgot. Invite other groups to the service desk, ask them to take calls for you while you're in team meetings.
  Set up a job shadowing program. This ties into career pathing and mapping we discussed earlier. Create cross functional trainings and meetings where all groups can participate and learn from each other. Provide opportunities for other groups to mentor and provide guidance to other teams. These ideas are simple. They aren't rocket science but so many companies do not take the time to sit down together and draft proper operating-level agreements and processes to build relationships with other teams.
  Think about what you can do for your team to foster and build programs, and you will better the entire service organization.
• We covered a lot of ground in our sessions, there are so many exciting strategies and tools we can use as service desk managers. I hope that you've enjoyed listening to and learning from our examples on how to implement strategies and best practices. What is your next step with all the information that we've covered? Hopefully you've created content that includes documenting your process, writing down questions to take back to your leadership team, and taking notes on specific strategies that you want to implement. Be sure to look through the information in your notes and think about your three key takeaways that you can implement immediately.
  You may also want to share this information with a member of management, who can help hold you accountable as well to implementing what you've learned. In this course we've focused specifically on management, and if you would like to focus on the learning and development of your technicians.