The Successful CXO
Committed to Customer Service

Reorganizing or streamlining the customer support or help desk requires a great deal of advanced planning. Keeping these two principles in mind will give you a framework upon which to hang your management and resource map.

Principle 1: Centralize the Help Desk/ Service Desk Management

Like many companies, your help desk functions may have become siloed with time and business growth. Perhaps your company has acquired new businesses, grown and split off divisions,  or opened branches. With each new venture, another help desk was created or acquired.

Now you are seeing more money going towards multiple service departments and supporting duplicate resources. Each service desk has its own store of knowledge and its own practices. One desk may be more or less effective than another. You have an inefficient use of revenue.

This is where this first principle comes into play.

    * Centralize the management

With centralized management the separate service desks can have access to the same knowledge base, perform the same practices, and bring cohesiveness to the function of the support process across the organization. This will go a long way towards increasing accountability, making certain that the incident clearly has an owner, that there is a single process to perform, and that the issue will not simply bounce around without being addressed. Knowledge and best practices sharing will improve first call resolutions while decreasing the time to resolution.

Principle 2: Decentralize Help Desk/ Service Desk Resources

Centralized management helps with efficiency and effectiveness due to shared practices and policy. But the resources should be left with the entities they serve.

Each division or business likely has a different need. Attempting to create a central resource for all is like having a jack of all trades. There is master of none. All areas would be underserved by a help desk that is broad in resource but shallow in capabilities and expertise. This in turn causes those who require assistance from the service desk feel like their particular needs are not being met or considered and will work around the system and establish a de facto help desk in their own area.

Decentralization helps customize help desk services to needs and will prove more effective over time.

In addition to increased effectiveness, decentralizing resources can be a form of disaster readiness if the decentralization is done geographically. In the case of one desk becoming unavailable, there will still be resources to draw on to keep business continuity.

Take-away:
Centralize management and decentralize resources.

The first will increase consistency, the second will increase availability.