Why external customers should use your Service Desk

Have you ever contacted a customer service department because of a process or technology failure? Perhaps the online ordering system has backed you into a dead end, or the Self-Service portal failed to give you the info you needed to complete an order.

It’s frustrating when you tell the customer service agent why the problem is occurred and they tell you they will report the problem – but you know they won’t and the problem will remain for the next poor customer. In the meantime you have wasted time making an phone call to fix something that shouldn’t occurred in the first place. The end result is you are a disgruntled customer.

The problem is that while IT has a crucial role in defining the customer experience, the department delivering consumer support rarely has any connection or influence over the technology team which has the power to fix it.

This means IT problems go unchecked, the customer service departments continues to receive repeat contacts about the same issues, and ultimately the customer experience suffers.

Given the Service Desk is built around the concept of supporting technology, it therefore makes perfect sense for it to take a central role fixing this problem. A Service Desk that fields IT-related issues from external customers – as well as staff – could make itself into an even stronger asset.

Even if you can’t open up the Service Desk to receive calls from external customers, you might be able to offer some of the tools, such as Self-Service and self-logging to consumers. You could also help customer service create a method for logging and fixing issues.

So the next time you have the opportunity to speak to the contact centre manager, or anyone with responsibility for customer experience, ask them how they record and action IT failures. There’s a great opportunity for Service Desks to prove their value to the business by addressing these important but lately overlooked area of customer experience.