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Indicates a new White Paper
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| Developing Service Level Agreements That Work |
| By Michael Yudkin |
| This paper offers guidelines for developing service
level agreements that work – agreements that support strategic corporate goals and help make the partnership between IT and corporate management a
productive one. Since I’ve been working in distributed infrastructure support, I’ve given examples that are
typical for that area, but the principles I describe apply to many other kinds of support. Any manager whose job
involves enabling other people to do their jobs faces similar issues.
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| Service Catalogs in the Higher Ed Environment |
| By Service Catalog musings of HDI’s Higher Ed Forum |
| Over the course of the past year HDI’s Higher Ed Forum has been discussing the
implementation of service catalogs in the higher education environment. Member schools are at
various stages of implementation; from just thinking about it, to refining their service catalogs
for a second or third time. The following may prove useful as a guide for beginning your service
catalog initiative. The paper will discuss what a service catalog is, some of the pitfalls to avoid
and how service catalogs in education may vary from our friends in the business community.
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| Implementation Guidance Regarding ITIL® Version 3.0 |
| By HDI SAB Task Force |
| A number of organizations have begun IT process improvement projects using the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) framework. A taskforce of the HDI Strategic Advisory Board was created and has researched the implications of changes under development. This paper is intended to provide guidance to HDI members who are in the midst of, or are considering IT process improvement project implementations based upon ITIL, and are asking questions about what these changes mean, and specifically how it impacts their current and future implementation plans.
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| Five Tips on Creating Customer Service Surveys |
| Fred Van Bennekom |
| In a competitive marketplace, what
you don’t know can hurt you.
If you don’t know what your customers
are thinking, how can you solve their
problems, and keep them coming back?
For many organizations, the answer is
to sponsor customer service surveys.
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| The Dangers of Poorly Done Research |
| Fred Van Bennekom |
| Imagine you’re planning to conduct a survey to support some key business decision-making process. But you have to get results fast. So, you throw together a quick survey because something is better than nothing. Right? Wrong. Why? Because the survey process may contain biases and errors that lead to incorrect and misleading data. Thus, the decisions will be made based on delusions of knowledge.
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| Creating Valued Services |
| by By Peter J. McGarahan, President, McGarahan
& Associates |
| How do you create
value? By enabling, servicing and supporting business functions
to generate a competitive business advantage. Then you must demonstrate
the value you create by linking business results to IT services.
This can only be successful if you implement the proper mechanisms
to capture/measure the business impact of the result. Business
impact, the delta of the before and after of your metric, must be
communicated to the organization. |
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| Bless Your Stress |
| by Mimi Donaldson |
| Renowned keynote
speaker/corporate trainer – and former NAWBO-LA president – Mimi
Donaldson has a suggestion for women business owners to help them
grow personally and professionally: Bless your stress. For that
matter, assess, confess, address, less, yes, finesse, press and
profess your stress. |
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| Government Customer Support |
| by Daryl Covey |
We’re the people
who deliver information, services, and support at the front lines
of
Government. There are many tens of thousands of us -- dedicated
military, civilian, and
contract employee professionals who staff, operate, and facilitate
call centers, help desks,
web sites, and other customer access channels across all levels
of Government. Through
our help desks and other internal touch points, we collectively
enhance the productivity,
reliability, and efficiency of both citizens and Government employees. |
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| The ITIL Handbook |
| by Phil Verghis with MRO Software |
| ITIL (the IT Infrastructure
Library) is the most widely accepted approach to IT Service Management
in the world. ITIL is a framework that outlines accepted best practices
for IT Service Management. Its concepts support IT service providers
as they plan consistent, documented, and repeatable processes that
improve service delivery and support. It was first developed in
the late 1980s by the UK Government’s Central Communications and
Telecom Agency as a way to gain control in a difficult-to-manage,
technology-based environment. |
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| High Performance and Corporate Culture |
| by Jason Young |
What exactly is
corporate culture? The dictionary defines culture as “the totality
of
socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions
and all other products of
human work and thought.” |
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| IT Professionalism |
| by Pete McGarahan & Ric Mims |
| There is something
nostalgic about the concept of “professionalism.” It used to be
that professionalism was a key requirement for success in any business.
Given the visible degradation of professionalism in today’s workplace,
I wonder if people still hold such a quaint notion in high regard. |
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| Erie Insurance Conquers Change Management |
| by Andrew Abramczyk |
| That's what we found
to be the case at Erie Insurance as we automated our IT change-management
process. Change management refers to the addition, modification
or removal of any component of an IT environment, not just hardware
and systems and application software. A firmware upgrade to a switch
and patch installation on a server are a few examples. |
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| On the Edge and In Control |
| by Arun Shukla |
Technical support
is drowning in choked network traffic, a sea of converging technologies,
data, and voice media competing for system resources and unique
configuration landscapes
for each customer. Positioned at the tail end of the value chain,
technical support has little
say in what is sold and how it is crafted and implemented. |
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| The Strategic Role of Customer Support |
| by Arun Shukla |
| If your customer
support is not focused on satisfying your most important customers
you are probably losing shareholder value. |
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| Using Process-driven Analysis in Contact Centers |
| by Brian Hinton |
| One of the primary
ways for contact center managers to ensure that their contact center
is a strategic resource for achieving corporate goals is to provide
solid analysis for budgets, resource projections, recommendations
and business cases - analysis that decision makers and executive
management find credible. |
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| Senior Management Visibility Is a Contact Sport |
| by Pete McGarahan |
| My message is simple:
As a support leader, you must set a course for positive change and
impact by engaging senior management in your function. Senior management
is the most powerful, influential force you have to champion your
support organization; and no single group has a greater ability
to make you obsolete. |
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| Strategic Thinking |
| by: Joanne L. Smikle |
| A look at the advantages
of the right mindset. |
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| Strengthening the Circle of Hiring |
| by Marc Van Baar |
| In the technical
service and support industry, we all seek methods to increase retention,
morale and performance. In an effort to avoid “mis-hires” and to
increase performance, Blackbaud has successfully implemented a method
of linking recruiting, training and coaching with performance. |
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| Diagonal Consulting Case Study: High Quality
SAP Support |
| by Phil Ball & Marina Stedman |
The company has
been using Touchpaper’s IT service management solutions since the
dedicated SAP support team was first established. “Once Diagonal
started offering SAP support services we quickly took the decision
to automate the service desk using Touchpaper software,” says Barry
Dewey, UK SAP Support Manager of Diagonal Consulting. “This allowed
us to scale our offering economically as demand for the
service grew and delivered a range of benefits, including faster
and more efficient incident resolution, better quality of customer
service and more granular management reporting.” |
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| 13 Things Nobody In Your Office Should Ever
Say, And What They Should Say, Instead |
| by George R. Walther |
Each day, every
day, colleagues throughout your office, including assistants and
front
desk staff who have direct interactions with your customers, are
unwittingly shooting
themselves in the feet. They’re using "powerless" expressions that
interfere with your
desire to project that positive, customer-friendly, "can do attitude"
that you want to get
across with every customer contact. |
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| Corporate Culture and Cookies |
| by Kirk Weisler |
| It is a wonderful
flight to Wisconsin on Midwest Airlines, where they serve fresh,
warm chocolate chip cookies at 30,000 feet. It’s their “signature
thing.” I love their signature so much I had them sign my napkin
twice! |
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| Building Credible Business Cases for Contact
Center Projects |
| by Brian Hinton |
| One requirement
for getting a contact center project approved is to deliver a credible
business case with projections decision makers can trust. However,
many centers face a credibility problem because they have failed
in the past to project accurate outcomes with their business cases.
Oftentimes, project costs far exceed expectations or the projected
productivity gains from new applications are not fully realized.
Decision makers have been burned too many times. They now require
a more thorough approach to business cases and ROI projections to
allay their skepticism. |
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| The Transformation of Customer Support |
| by Greg Oxton |
Customer support
is undergoing a major transformation. The rise of indirect
support – online self-help, user forums, and help and automation
integrated into
products – is profoundly affecting the role of conventional direct
support –
person-to-person interactions by phone, email, or chat. Managing
direct support,
especially across multiple channels, presents support execs with
challenges
enough. But managing the new combination of indirect and direct
support takes
those challenges to a whole new level. |
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| A Demand-based View of Support: From the Funnel
to the Cloud |
| by Greg Oxton |
| A holistic view
of providing an outstanding Customer Experience. |
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| Getting Great Results: Turning Talent Into Performance |
| by Garrison Wynn |
| What exactly are
we trying to accomplish by proving to others that we’re right? We
might win the argument but ultimately lose the relationship. Perhaps
a better, deeper-rooted question is this: Why do we lose sight of
success, of our big objective, when we feel challenged or intimidated?
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| How To Be Right Without Making Other People
Wrong |
| by Garrison Wynn |
| How To Be Right
Without Making Other People Wrong |
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| CRM Black Hole |
| by Mark Shell |
| Astute Customer
Service, Service Desk, and IT managers understand the value of
getting the quality, actionable information they need to make sound business
decisions. Companies that accurately understand their customer’s needs are able to provide
superior product and service value to the customer, thus
improving sales and customer loyalty. Yet, despite having spent
up to millions of dollars on their Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) systems, there is often a huge gap between the
information needed and the data being collected. Either the
beneficial information is not being gathered at all, or there is
so much information available, we become overloaded and can take
no reasonable action. The appropriate data gets lost in the
quagmire of irrelevant data. The CRM system becomes a Black
Hole, with tons of information going in, but very little of use
coming out. Besides the potential loss of revenue due to
customer dissatisfaction, the money initially invested in a CRM
system is effectively wasted, if you are not getting the
specific, accurate, actionable information you need to make
sound decisions. |
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