Navigating Growing Pains with Your Service Desk Employees

My company’s rapid expansion has caused growing pains on our service desk. But after taking time to assess current operations through on-site and off-site meetings and rolling out a new mission statement, we’re on our way toward making things better. I wanted to share a few challenges and what we’ve learned from them:

Hiring a new vendor

We’ve been struggling with field service issues for a while. We use a combination of our own employees and third-party technicians to supplement our remote areas. Our employees were doing great, but the third-party vendor was consistently falling short on SLA attainment and we weren’t pleased with their techs. After months of promised improvement, we decided to go in a different direction. 

Our new vendor has their own service desk for their techs to call into. With the old vendor, we were their primary source of support. This new arrangement freed up our agents, as long as we provided them with knowledge articles to support our restaurants. 

Following a successful pilot period, we entered into a long-term arrangement with them. The time saved by not handling tech calls has paid off in better service to our restaurants. While this did cause some disruption to our restaurants and a lot of setup/onboarding work for the management staff, it was worth it.

Key takeway: Stand up for your customers. If you have a vendor that’s performing poorly and you’ve done everything you can to try and turn the situation around, go in a different direction.

Improving our service portal

We also want to increase adoption of our service portal. Upon logging in, our restaurants could choose between more than 40 different topics to report issues. In theory, this was great for the service desk because incidents came “coded” and ready to be worked with all details needed. In reality, it was too confusing for our non-technical restaurant staff to figure out.

I made it clear that the goal in the third-generation service portal was simplicity. We set a rule that there would be a maximum of five mouse clicks from logging on to hitting “Submit” and we would handle the incident categorization on our end. We also agreed that there would be no more than six options on a screen and no more than three screens deep (other departments like Payroll, HR and others used the portal, so we needed this elasticity).

Lastly, we wanted to build an internal customer-facing knowledge base and use the contextual search feature of our ITSM solution to show relevant knowledge articles as restaurants were entering their issues in hopes that they might be able to resolve their own issue. After rolling out the new portal, our goal was to eliminate email as an inbound channel. 

But here’s the thing with e-mail: Although it was easy for our restaurants to submit, we had a lot of duplicate incidents due to managers not communicating between shifts and that caused everyone a lot of extra work. Additionally, although not advised, some restaurants would report a critical incident via email and if we didn’t catch it quickly, the restaurant could be unexpectedly down for an extended period. Lastly, in our new service portal, as you start to type whatever is your issue, relevant knowledge articles display that (we hope) will cause incident deflection. You can’t get that with email.

To ensure that we had the design right, we decided to engage a small focus group of restaurant managers and field leadership to be a part of the development experience. I’d love to tell you that we’ve rolled out the new portal, but sadly, it’s been stuck at about 80% complete for the past six months as the development team focuses on other priorities. My hope is that it will be piloted soon so that we can get feedback on our approach. The eventual goal is to eliminate email as an inbound channel once this is in place.

Key takeaway: If you want to remove an inbound channel, you need to make the replacement channel just as easy for your customers to use. Engage your customers as part of the process to ensure what you are building will suit everyone’s needs.

Outgrowing our space

We also faced growing pains in our physical office space. When the opportunity came up for us to expand our room for the upcoming office renovation, I received broad support from senior leadership to engage a furniture contractor to re-build the space with proper sound proofing and noise isolation. Work on the new space began in November. Then, I asked our procurement department as to which furniture contractor they had engaged with to build out the new space.  I was told that they knew nothing of my request and had already purchased additional long tables to fill the newly expanded space. In fact, they were proud that the new room could seat 35 people at once. My heart sank.

We ended up keeping the long table arrangement. However, our architect stepped back in and proposed putting a fabric wallpaper on the walls and swapping out the ceiling tiles with ones that had better sound absorption. That worked.  We’ve had as many as 15 people in the room at once and the sound hasn’t been too loud.

Key takeaway: In a fast-growing company, communication can sometimes fall short as everyone typically wears many hats. Such was the case with our office renovation. I should have done a better job of ensuring that my request for new furniture, once approved, made it back to those who actually purchase it.