For many professionals, the service desk represents the face of IT. The quality of the service desk experience will go a long way in defining the perception of the whole IT organization—especially for adults under 40 who’ve grown up with technology and become accustomed to high-quality personal technology services. That inevitable comparison makes it essential for IT organizations to modernize their service desk to improve user experience, efficiency, and accountability.
“57% of support organizations saw an increase in ticket volumes” – HDI 2016 Technical Support Survey
Breaking down silos across point solutions can be an important element of service desk modernization. Let’s explore how extending service management through tight integration with endpoint management contributes to better service desk KPIs such as user satisfaction, call volume, and time to resolution.
User experience
Users get frustrated when they have to provide all kinds of basic information over the phone or through a form before their issue is even considered. A first benefit of integrating endpoint management with service management is to automatically link user data with information about their technology (e.g. devices, software, configuration) so agents have firsthand data available with the ticket when they start working on a case. For users, this shows that agents are knowledgeable and ready to move quickly toward resolution.
Self-service can eliminate the need for many cases to be routed to the right group, queued, and eventually processed by an agent. While it doesn’t reduce the number of requests, it empowers users to solve many issues themselves without having to contact the service desk – improving user satisfaction. Endpoint management integration with a service catalog allows IT to offer rich services that can be automatically delivered to the user. For example, software request workflows can be automated end-to-end, from requesting an application, to approvals and license checks, to getting it installed on a device.
“The goal should be to make IT self-service the default support option and raise customer satisfaction at the same time. Self-service is both cost-effective and scalable.” – Gartner report, Design IT Self-Service for the Business Consumer, Chris Matchett, 4 October 2017.
More efficient agents
Automatically linking tickets with data about users and their technology doesn’t just improve user satisfaction, it also improves the service desk agent’s efficiency by eliminating the need for them to ask for this information, as well as the errors that can result from manual investigation.
Endpoint integration makes it possible to directly perform diagnostics or remediation actions from a ticket through remote control tools or pre-defined remote actions, thus reducing back-and-forth cycles between tools. This integration can also limit the number of escalations needed, avoiding lengthy work queues and the risk of miscommunication, and offering the user a real single point of contact.
Because it is important to keep track of how a case was solved, agents can spend a significant amount of time documenting their actions. Endpoint management integration allows the service desk to automatically save information about the device involved, record actions that have been taken (e.g. remote control performed by agent X at HH:MM:SS) to improve ticket data quality, and provide more transparency at no cost.
Proactive endpoint maintenance
With ITSM integration, software agents running on client systems can monitor many parameters and generate alerts and tickets without a user being involved. Examples include a system with storage approaching capacity, or out-of-compliance antivirus tools, or a critical event which has been detected. This allows the service desk staff to handle the problem before it impacts the user, and schedule a maintenance task when there is no risk of lost productivity.
Having information about users and their devices properly documented in incidents will also ease potential problem investigation and help to target mass remediation actions.
Extending your service management through BMC Helix Client Management
BMC Helix Client Management optimizes your service management solution to provide comprehensive, automated endpoint management, delivering great service to end users while minimizing cost, maintaining compliance, and reducing security risk. Comprehensive ITSM integration includes self-service portals, CMDBs, and service desk consoles via native integration with Remedy with Smart IT, CMDB, Remedyforce, BMC FootPrints, and Digital Workplace. The solution also offers a comprehensive REST API for additional integrations.
