A Look at The Next Generation of Service Desk [Infographic]

Service desks are a necessity for any organization that harnesses the advantages of IT and the same time, wants to operate efficiently and effectively.

As technology develops at a rapid pace, the IT service desk provided by companies will need to keep up. Moreover, because service desks of today have become the primary point of contact between the service provider and its customers, businesses must also provide customers a useful interface that meets their most current support needs.

Here’s an infographic on what the next generation of service desk support looks like.

 

 

The Pitfalls of Dated Service Desk

Outdated ticketing tools. Old service desks have dated ticketing systems which result in delays in handling times, lower productivity, and reduced customer satisfaction.

Rising costs of ownership. Owning a dated service desk require more maintenance, and ultimately, raising operational costs.

Data migration risks. Dated service desks often do not offer secure data migrations in case you need the support data on another platform or business process.

Lack of cloud capacities. Cloud services enable businesses and customers to access information from anywhere, but old service desks do not have cloud functions.

Endless support requests. Without modern self-service offerings, running a dated service desk will result in incessant tickets and support requests.

 

What are the Challenges of Today’s Service Desks?

Making businesses work better. Service desks won’t just be on standby to fix computers anymore; rather they will be about monitoring systems, preempting, and communicating service outages.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). BYOD is gaining traction in the workplace, and the broad range of devices that the service desk will be required to support will create massive problems if not considered.

Cloud services. When things go wrong, the IT service desk will be the first line of support and the end-user won’t care who owns the resource—they just want help right away.

Customers wanting an immediate response. Consumers demand quick solutions to their support requests using the channel that they prefer.

Social media aspect. Employees and customers now use social networks to seek assistance or complain about IT-related issues—making social media an important channel to monitor for organizations.

The self-service dilemma. The millennial and post-millennial generations may want the convenience of searching FAQs and knowledge bases themselves, but Gen Xers and baby boomers still like picking up to speak to a service desk representative.

Growth of email tickets. Email tickets take longer to close. In fact, tickets created via email have a lifespan six times longer than live telephone calls.

 

How the New Generation of Service Desk Will Look Like

Multi-channel service desk. The future service desk will cover the channels most preferred by customers and employees. This will include social media, mobile applications, instant messaging, video chats, and many others.

Minority tickets. Remember Minority Report, where Tom Cruise was able to control everything remotely with a computer system and a pair of gloves? This is the future of remote desktop protocols that’s currently being used

Self-learning chatbots. Chatbots are self-learning, artificially-intelligent programs that service desks can use to instantly provide answers to questions and support requests made via instant chat

Intelligent optimization Service desks can take advantage of smart-learning algorithms to automate the urgency level of tickets by reading the words and data inside of it.

The “people element.” The future of service desk is dependent on how technologies meet the needs of not just the business, but how it provide a productive and satisfying environment for customers and employees.

 

Although it keeps on evolving and changing along with technology, service desk support is here to stay. What’s important for organizations to keep in mind is that the real shift is happening in the way that the customer behaves around devices, and ensure that they keep the ‘people element’ in meeting business objectives.

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