Last month, I shared with you about a journey to world-class support that my service desk is on. I was asked to temporarily oversee our company’s service desk due to the departure of their director. After initially spending time with the management and staff on assessing operations, I discovered that we were about three weeks behind in working on non-critical incidents, SLA attainment was horrible, and we were losing 1-2 people a week, quitting due to burnout. The reason for this was that our company had taken on a large acquisition, and while the service desk grew in size to accommodate it, the way it operated was not scalable.
The story continues…
Assessing the Damage and Building a Plan
With so many staff leaving, we had lots of payroll budget to spare. My boss had an idea to add seven extra temps onto the staff for the summer using the payroll that we had “saved” by all of the vacancies to help us get ahead. It was brilliant! I immediately asked our HR recruiters to get busy. In 2 weeks, it seemed like everyone on the management team was booked in interviews, and we quickly hired all 7. My boss also approved my idea to hire a full-time trainer and knowledge engineer (the Level 2 staff loosely maintained our knowledge base, but it had little consistency). We promoted one of our Level 1 agents to this new role. We quickly organized a more formal training program, and the seven new hires started four weeks of classroom training to get up to speed on our systems and processes.
While the training was ongoing, I proposed two days of offsite strategic planning to the management staff. I wanted to spend time with the management team to understand their perspectives on our challenges more in-depth and take in their ideas on how we can make things better. Getting everyone together in a room for 6 hours that typically work odd schedules was difficult, but we did it. We started the first day talking about culture, trying to understand the attributes of the present vulture and then what we’d like it to be. We then reviewed our initial stab at the new agent training program and made some changes based on initial feedback. After lunch, we discussed how to better hold agents accountable for their work and what “good” looked like for our team. We also deeply investigated what was burning people out and causing the turnover. Coming out of this first day was a lot of action items, but I think one of the best was the desire to form two committees staffed with both Level 1 and 2 agents to focus on critical challenges. The “Inefficient Processes Committee” was charged with documenting every inefficient process on the desk and working towards solutions. The “Metrics and Measurements” committee focused on better holding each other accountable and more transparently sharing our results with leadership.
Another great idea generated in our planning session was a new “supervisor on duty” program that would designate one supervisor on each shift to do nothing but handle incident escalations, monitor the queues, answer questions from staff, and be available for whatever was needed, eliminating a burden that was causing the service desk managers to get too far into the weeds on daily operations. When a supervisor was in this role, they were not allowed to attend meetings or conduct 1:1s with their direct reports; their focus was entirely on running the shift, and they were THE point of contact for anything needed. This program has been wildly successful, allowing our internal customers to respond rapidly to incident escalations and giving our agents a clear point of contact if they needed anything during their shift. This also allowed our managers to catch a break, especially on nights and weekends when they were off.
I was excited! After this first day, I felt like the management staff and I were on the same page and had developed a great bond of trust with each other. Additionally, they all got to know each other better, as some of them rarely see others on the team due to working different shifts. We also emerged with some concrete next steps on our improvement journey.
Several weeks later, we met for the second day of our offsite planning and spent much of it discussing our ITSM solution. We invited the system administrator and his manager and went through our pain points and “wish list.” We had another great discussion, and coming out of that were a bunch of needed enhancement requests from the group. We also received a good briefing on the system’s upcoming product roadmap.
These meetings were significant for several reasons:
- I don’t know everything. Many of the new management team members were formerly agents, so they had great feedback to share on current operations, what should be changed, and how.
- It allowed them to see and buy into where we needed to go. We all needed to be on the same page when making operations changes, as I knew our agents would likely test our resolve.
- It provided a time to get to know each other better, which I knew would pay dividends in the long run.
Building Momentum and Driving Improvement
After these meetings and after our new hires completed their training, something magical happened. People stopped leaving. The mood in the room changed as the new hires didn’t know about some of the previous struggles and growing pains. They were excited to begin making a difference. We also started to get caught up slowly. To better track our progress, I asked the closing supervisor each night to start pasting a screenshot of a dashboard showing our backlog so that everyone could see our instant messaging system. It was (and still is) the first thing I look at each morning.
The two committees continued to meet regularly. The metrics and measurements team initially struggled a bit as our ITSM solution, while fully featured, did not have much functionality initially active. For example, we could not measure incident handle time. They settled on a scorecard measuring available things like how many incidents each person resolved in a shift and customer satisfaction and quality audit scores with the expectation that more and better metrics would come later. It was a start. On the Inefficient Processes Committee, they listed about 20 things they wanted to change in their first meeting! From direct integrations between our ITSM solution and supplier systems to make communication flow better to adding phone numbers for our user base into their caller records so that we could call them back without having to dig around for their phone numbers, I was pleased with what was being surfaced and the progress being made.
We also started a Problem Management team. This team, composed of a few levels 1 and 2 agents and led by a supervisor, began meeting twice a week for about 2 hours each and initially focused on reviewing any restaurant that called the desk more than three times a week. This was a massive investment in time for us, but it directly benefited our restaurants and was starting to impact volume. In the year since this started, they’ve resolved over 250 problems. Initially, I thought the service desk was a strange place to have a problem management team, but it worked for us and made a real impact, so we kept it. That team still meets today.
Unexpected Setbacks and Key Takeaways
It seemed like we were on a roll. The management staff was engaged, and the agents were excited as the backlog was shrinking. The committees were starting to make a difference. I was feeling great! However, it was short-lived. Around the end of July, we started hearing from the temps that we hired that they needed to quit and go back to school. Wait, what? We regularly recruited relatively young folks to work for us, so I assumed that they either were done with or were not in school, and extending them into the fall would be no issue. Turns out they all were in school, and all seven needed to depart by the middle of August. Ugh.
Some key takeaways:
- It’s good to get your leadership team together periodically, even though it may be challenging due to people working different shifts. It helps in building team cohesiveness.
- Successfully implementing change involves ensuring that your ENTIRE team is on board. One of the best ways to do this is to involve as many as possible in the process.
- Celebrate the wins, no matter how small. Those dashboard screenshots were simple to take, and they built excitement amongst the team as they could tangibly see the difference that they were making as the backlog decreased.
- Communicate! Periodically, the leadership team updated the committees on their progress. This demonstrated, particularly with the Inefficient Process Committee, that we were listening to agents and actively working to improve things.
In next month’s article, I’ll share how we recovered from the “Temp Exodus of 2023,” started a redesign of our self-service portal, and successfully switched service providers for our “feet on the street.”