Last year, we surveyed our Service Desk customers about the service they receive from us. We wanted to know your likes and dislikes so that we would know what we’re getting right, and where we have room for improvement.

Among the praise for our friendly and knowledgeable staff, the fact that a real person answers the phone here in the UK, and even our ‘on hold’ music, we did spot a trend amid the frustrations you reported back: communication.

One major step we’ve taken to address this issue is with regular role-playing sessions. We’re spending time every month to look at our service from your point of view and work through various scenarios using the most common incidences we come across. This is giving us all a better understanding of what our Service Desk looks like client-side, and helps us identify areas where our communication is not reflecting the quality of service we deliver.

New IT Documentation Platform

Another way we’re improving communication is with our new documentation platform, IT Glue. This gives clients improved access to resources such as our user guides, ensuring that information is just a click away.

It is also having a real impact on our Service Desk as it has meant we are able to access your documentation more quickly and therefore respond to your requests rapidly. With a more efficient documentation platform our team are able to find passwords and historic data faster, allowing them to get to work straightaway with all the information at their fingertips. We’re already seeing a marked improvement in response and resolution times because of this and as we continue to develop the system, this wil continue to improve.

IT Service Desk: Priority of Your Ticket

Many of you said in our customer satisfaction survey, that you didn’t know how seriously we were treating your incident; and I think a few of you thought that we didn’t appreciate how urgent the problem was. Firstly, let me reassure you as a service provider we take all calls from our clients very seriously and quickly identify the priority of your ticket and get to work. However, in the past we’ve not been so good at communicating this, perhaps assuming that you know what our target response and resolution times are depending on the severity level of the issue.

Of course, we now appreciate that this is not necessarily the case. Not everyone has a copy of our service contract on their desk, or knows how different incidents are classified in terms of priority! So, we have taken this on board and are improving our communications with you.

This means that now we will tell you either on the phone, or via email if you email in your ticket, what priority your tickets has been logged at and therefore what response time to expect. For those high priority tickets we will also endeavour to keep you updated more frequently while we address the issue.

Less Time Logged in To Your PC

Another concern that was identified in our survey was the problem with our engineers monopolising your computers while they addressed a fault or request. This naturally prevents you from getting on with your work and impacts on your business. While we do need to access your PC to rectify specific problems, we are working on way to allows us to do more behind the scenes to minimise disruption to your productivity.

With this in mind, we’re inveting in some tools that will enable us to reduce the time we spend interrupting you, only taking control of your PC when we absolutely need to.

Slow Machines

Legacy hardware and IT infrastructure inevitably does impact on the speed of your IT systems and can be very frustrating for users.. We continually advise clients about performance issues as part of our ongoing service.. However we will be more proactive during our quarterly client business meetings to review your hardware assets, their performance and what action can be taken to address any specific issues.

We are also growing our portfolio of Strategic Advisory Services, which include our popular Discovery Workshops, which are designed to help businesses who find it a challenge to ensure that they can use technology to help meet their core business objectives. Speak to our team on 0330 124 3599 to find out more.

We know that our clients have already noticed a big difference in our IT services and that good communication is at the heart of this.