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Q. How has Socitm benchmarking helped you improve your service desk operation?
Six years ago, we noticed that our benchmarking data showed we had a high average time to resolve incidents compared to others and we also had a comparatively high number of incidents. We completed an extensive review, starting at the service desk operation looking at staff numbers, call handling process, types of calls received, issues cropping up and what the solutions were, then analysed everything throughout IT to see how we resolved incidents whether applications, data, networking or an endpoint device. We implemented a number of changes across the service desk operations.
We made significant process improvements, introducing a self-service portal for staff with an associated knowledge base, as well as a new and improved service desk management system that has a degree of AI learning. If you start to tell the service desk portal what kind of incident you are reporting, you get suggestions and links to internal articles on how to resolve your issue. Education staff really like that, because a teacher reporting an incident to IT only has a few minutes between classes. After significant work around that, the next survey found we had reduced our annual call numbers from about 40,000 to 13,000, while our average resolution times fell from well over four hours to about two and a half hours.
We worked on things like password resets, which generated quite a high number of calls six years ago but have almost disappeared now because of security and device type changes we have made. Around 38% to 40% of our calls coming in were issues related to devices, so we focused on improving our build process for deploying devices and saw a huge reduction in calls. We also settled on new hardware and specifications five years ago, using different procurement routes to get better, more stable devices.
We went from having an average-performing IT service desk operation to an efficient and responsive service that gets tremendous positive feedback from staff across the council. I am not saying we are perfect all the time, but most of the time we are doing a good job.
Q. How did you use comparisons with other councils?
We noticed that our average time to fix from first point of contact was really poor. We had a number of IT service desk operators who were non-technical but experienced communicators who knew where to route an issue within the IT service. When compared to a number of other councils we noticed we had a sizeable gap in our time to fix and we spoke to colleagues in other councils to find out how they were resourcing their service desks and what processes they had in place. It is a tight-knit community in Scotland, all the local authorities love to help each other out and are open about sharing.
We saw that quite a few of the authorities with better performance on that particular metric had technical IT engineers answering the calls who, on quite a high number of calls, were able to deliver a fix there and then. We juggled staff across the service and recruited two new service desk engineers who now take calls and try to resolve issues and problems at the first point of contact, but they also know when to escalate to second-line staff if they can’t.
Q. What else did you change to improve the service desk operation?
There are a number of call types that don’t need to involve our engineering teams and can be ‘self served’. So our customers are advised to log such calls via the self-service portal rather than by calling the service desk. This led to a huge drop in the amount of unnecessary contact via the phone. Six years ago about 80% of service desk contact was via the phone. Now, email and the self-service portal makes up 80% of contact with telephony about 16% and walk-ins the rest. This has resulted in a much more efficient use of engineering time.
Although the service desk has a much more engineer focused outlook, all of the staff have gone through customer service training and they offer an excellent service to our customers.
All of our gains in this area come from analysing the benchmarking data, seeing where the gaps are and then starting the hard work of talking to the councils who have better results than us, and establishing if we can follow their lead, how we might improve, how quickly we can deliver a change, what can we do quickly to address the customers’ needs and what can we do in the medium-term to gain further benefit.
Our business cases use data to measure what we need to change and improve and, most importantly, the benefits and efficiencies we can expect post implementation. All of this was easier to predict when using the national benchmarking comparators.
Q. Have there been other benefits from your service desk changes?
We made these major changes prior to the pandemic in 2020. All of a sudden staff were working remotely so having an agile service desk was a real benefit, as we were processing and resolving issues much more quickly during a period where everyone was dealing with other new challenges. We came through that period really well, which shone through in the last satisfaction survey – we got a lot of praise on the back of that.
If you can resolve issues first time you will have happy customers and use our engineering resources in a much more efficient manner. When technology breaks down, everyone needs a quick fix or we start getting backlogs and dissatisfaction amongst customers and staff, so you have a tremendous ripple effect across the organisation when your IT service resolves matters quickly and is performing well. Your customers will appreciate the support you provide, will adapt quickly to new practices and your service desk will go from strength to strength. Of course, we are all only too aware that you are only as good as the last successful issue you resolved, so complacency must be avoided.
See also: Argyll and Bute Council’s overall approach to using Socitm benchmarking