A service catalog is an electronic list of products and services made available to all divisions within a company as well as the company's clients. John Sundberg, author of the article "Technology of Business Alignment: Leveraging Service Catalogs Throughout Enterprise," makes the analogy that a service catalog is similar to a company's personalized Amazon.com, since it is a web-based interface that allows employees to "shop" for and request services. Once the "order" is placed, the service requested is monitored in real-time until the service is complete.

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Today, service desks are facing increased demand due to more end-user usage of complex software. Improving the performance of help desks requires solving problems quickly and efficiently.

However, many firms question what they should prioritize when changing their help desks. Should the firm prioritize cost cutting or customer satisfaction? Between changing handle time and abandonment rates, which decision will prove to be more valuable? At first glance, it might seem impossible to find a solution that solves multiple issues instead of merely changing priorities.

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Most of us can relate to a time when we couldn't find the information we needed in a timely manner. Perhaps it related to fixing a broken printer, or more seriously, answering a client's question that could make or break a deal. Either way, valuable time and resources are spent trying to resolve work-related issues. Resolving these issues is usually the charge of the help desk personnel, but when every issue is directed their way, the burden on these employees may become quite overwhelming.

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At first glance, "inventory" might appear to be yet another item on a company's balance sheet. However, as most businesses know, the importance of tracking inventory cannot be understated. In an economy that constantly demands efficiency, it is becoming increasingly common for businesses to adopt Information Technology Asset Management (ITAM). Although managing the life cycles of inventory can be incredibly complicated, ITAM offers clients real-time monitoring of all assets, which enables businesses to significantly lower the risk of asset loss.

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Colleges present different challenges for IT help desks than businesses. For starters, they have different customers and different hours. Students are extremely tech savvy, much more so than the average working adult, and possess high expectations not only for the technology available to them, but also for support.

In addition, students often use their own technology and work away from a physical campus. Unlike in a traditional business setting, in which employees mainly work on the company's devices, IT help desks must contend with compatibility issues more often.

Given these distinctions, it is not particularly surprising that a successful help desk for an institution of higher learning is fundamentally different from that of a business.

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More than ever, businesses are analyzing market data in an attempt to better understand consumers' buying habits. However, data is often outdated by the time it reaches businesses, or the information is too broad and generalizing to draw any real conclusions. Analyzing market data is analogous to "looking in a rear view mirror," according to the authors of "Customer Intelligence: Connecting the Dots for Service Insight," who emphasize the importance of customer intelligence in anticipating consumer needs.

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Every tech-savvy person has heard (or even experienced) customer support horror stories at least once. These tales usually lament the struggle of dealing with users who seem to have no right to be anywhere near a computer: users who cannot find the "any" key, users who cannot tell the difference between the spacebar and backspace key, or users who do not even know what an operating system is.

Even though home computers have become easier to use, customers might still feel confused or frustrated. When business customers contract engineers for new software, it is often difficult for the tech-savvy to speak the language of the customer and nail down exactly what features the client is seeking. Effective communication is vital in both customer service and business-to-business relationships, and learning how to speak the language of your client is often easier said than done.

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Best Practice simply means the most effective way that has been determined to accomplish a desired goal. In order to improve, an organization must assess its current practices against those used in other organizations. The following are some Help Desk Best Practices, summarized from Giva's free whitepaper on this topic, recommended to be used when evaluating what your company is doing and why, and what your company should be doing and when, as well as what features and functions you should look for in help desk software.

Part one detailed several best practices for help desk optimization. Listed below are additional recommendations for implementation.

Perform Root Cause Analysis Every Day to Determine Why Problems Occur

It is important to be able to track the root of issues, so the actual cause of problems can be determined.  This helps with forward planning and being able to determine which areas of IT (hardware, operating systems, networking, etc.) might need more attention.  Ideally, the help desk software should allow for easy tracking, and even possibly requiring, the selecting of a root cause before closing a ticket, and/or entering/requiring problem resolutions.  Further, root cause reports should be available, to identify specific issues and trends.

Implement Service Level Agreements Linked to Impact on Firm Revenue

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are an important part of help desk accountability to the customer, and compliance with them can impact customer satisfaction or even revenue.  A help desk should not only implement SLAs, but should be able to track compliance in various levels of granularity, from the overall help desk or service groups (eg. facilities, networking, etc.) to the individual agents; and SLA trends reports should be available, which can be valuable to management, in understanding how effectively services are being provided.

Utilize Predefined and Customizable Help Desk Reports

Agents and management should have a wide variety of reports available that they can quickly access, easily customize, share with others, and use to analyze their areas of responsibility to keep the customer service process flowing smoothly.  The reports should also provide the right data to assist in better decision-making.

Use Real-Time Reporting Features That Decrease Time Required to Prepare Reports

Having real-time reports customized and automatically e-mailed to users, or easily downloaded in various formats (eg. Excel, PDF, etc.), can further provide useful data for quicker analysis and better decision-making, and can save time and money.

Implement an Asset Management System That Is Integrated With the Help Desk Software System

Having an asset management system integrated with a help desk software ticketing system not only can better provide root-cause analysis, but the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) foundation in part requires tracking changes to assets, which can also help in saving problem-diagnostic times.   This type of asset management can include software license tracking as well, helping IT departments better track licensing compliance.

Implement an Integrated ITIL Change Management Software System

Integrating a change management system with the help desk software system can reduce problems due to change-related failure.  Not only can the help desk be prepared ahead of time with information about upcoming changes, perhaps even notifying its customers beforehand, but once implemented, issues can be tracked, and backout plans implemented if necessary.  Further, problem tracking analysis can help better plan for future changes.  This type of system keeps the change and help desk teams much more coordinated and functioning as a cohesive unit.

For a much more in-depth look, please refer to Giva's free whitepaper on Help Desk Best Practices.

With today's mobile workforce, the ability to access answers to important questions quickly is a must. Meghan M. Biro at Forbes says there is a "need to maintain a corporate culture supportive of - and with technical and communications systems in place - to enable remote employees to be successful."

Saint Elizabeth Health Care has long been a leader in incorporating technology to support new and innovative ways of delivering care, information and improvement of health care practices. Many of Saint Elizabeth's 6,500 employees work remotely providing health care services in clients' homes and other community settings.

Because of this, Saint Elizabeth has been an innovator in the private cloud and was the first health care organization in Canada to offer employees a full suite of applications in a private cloud over ten years ago. Saint Elizabeth was looking for the newest generation of IT service desk functionality and a long-term vendor partnership to respond to rapid organizational growth. Following an evaluation of other service desk vendors, the organization identified concerns that replacing the current IT service desk tools would be highly disruptive. In their search, they found Giva to be what they were looking for.

"Giva has provided Saint Elizabeth with a solution that makes extraordinary economic sense and has achieved a high ROI in a very short period of time. The organization was looking for a true cloud-based service with multi-tenancy to avoid the cost of dedicated servers," said David Burne, IT Leader.

Upon switching to Giva, Saint Elizabeth realized the following ongoing benefits:

• 40% increase in productivity of the IT service desk team by using Giva reports and dashboards
• 50% lower TCO (total cost of ownership) over a three year period
• 90% reduction in the time required to configure/customize Giva
• 100% application uptime using Giva nearly 24x7

According to David Burne, "Giva does not wait years or even months to launch new product improvements. The stream of improvements is ongoing. Giva is very proactive in that they take time to carefully listen to feedback. Saint Elizabeth has never worked with a vendor that listens and delivers as well as Giva. This is one of the key ways that Giva is very unique!"

Learn more about the benefits of Giva at Saint Elizabeth Case Study.

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