Three tips to improve your Service Desk customer experience

Delivering a positive customer experience is becoming the most effective way to prove the value of the Service Desk. Here’s three surefire ways to bring customer experience to the fore and ensure your Service Desk remains the first point of call for business customers seeking IT support.

Tip One: Stop preaching, start facilitating

A common mistake Service Desk managers make when attempting to improve the customer experience is preaching the importance of customer service to the people delivering it. This understandably leads Service Desk leaders to talk about the importance of being emphatic and positive, but this can very patronising for front line staff. Service Desk staff are no different to any other worker: they want job satisfaction and to achieve this by offering a positive outcome for customers. Therefore, they already understand the importance of service. The job of the Service Desk leader is facilitate them to do a good job, not instruct them to do so.

Tip Two: Ask the right people the right questions

Most Service Desk’s survey their customers to find ways to improve service, but often overlook the opinion of the people who handle the most interactions: the Service Desk staff. Ask them: what is stopping you delivering a positive customer experience? Is it the sluggish and inflexible Service Desk system? An antiquated and unnecessary process? Perhaps they are chasing an efficiency-related metric that causes them to rush the call? There are many barriers to a positive customer experience and leaders should tap into this resource to remove them.

Tip Three: Rethink recruitment and measurement

To truly embed a Service Desk customer experience that makes IT support stand out, leaders need to rethink the metrics they target staff on. They also need to change their priorities when recruiting. It’s always been easier to teach technical knowledge than people skills, and now customers are more tech-savvy and able to Google solutions to common IT problems, the importance of staffing Service Desks with good listeners and communicators has grown significantly.