The Top 10 Service and Support Best Practices

I had a moment when I needed to write these down based on a interim Help Desk Management assignment. What do you think?

The Top 10 Service and Support Best Practices:

1. Attitude is everything - go into every situation with a positive attitude and the intent on doing the right thing for the customer and everyone will benefit.
2. No excuses, just solutions - never dead-end your customer or assume you know the details of their issue/request without "seeking to understand", asking the right questions and actively listening.
3. Team work - empowering the team to make front-line decisions and coordinate best practice processes is the only way Service Desks can survive and thrive in today's ever demanding role as the Customer Advocate and single point of contact for all customer issues and requests.
4. Customer Advocate - you represent the 'voice of the customer' which means the customer trusts you to represent them and their issue/request to the other support teams, coordinate timely resolutions and eliminate reoccurring issues.
5. Total Contact Ownership - is built upon the premise that the Service Desk will continue to address a customer's issue/request and follow up until the issue or question is resolved to the customer's satisfaction. The entire team must diligently and relentlessly follow-up on ALL of their un-resolved tickets (especially the ones not recently statuses), no matter who is currently assigned to work on it.
6. Quality Ticket Documentation - Research, diagnose, prioritize and document thoroughly (it did not happen if it's not documented in the ticket). Always ask yourself - "if I was sending this to myself - would I have the right information to begin resolving the issue from the last trouble-shouting step attempted by the Service Desk?"
7. Fun - having fun is a key component of successful teams. It is up to all of you to make your environment and Service Desk culture a place that is supportive, respectful, hard-working, focused & fun. Fun will be much more "fun" when all of you all agree that you have earned and deserve it.
8. Being Proactive - Spotting trends, related issues and reoccurring issues and working to ensure that we minimize business impact, communicate appropriately and work to learn from the situation. Provide assistance in bringing visibility to the issue and its impact and what we need to do to identify the root cause and long-term resolution - eliminating the reoccurrence of these problems.
9. First Contact Resolution - you should use all of our available resources (team members, training, tools, documentation, past incidents, etc.) to facilitate solving our customers issue on the first contact. It leads to a higher level of customer satisfaction, improves our image, allows Level-2 teams to be more responsive and improves our productivity. Research issues in depth or resolved and only escalate when you have exhausted all avenues to resolve at the Service Desk. If you don’t know the answer – find out by research or asking someone - the collection of learning in the process will better prepare you for the next time this issue is reported. Always Know!
10. Solve the Business Problem First - then address the technical or policy issues. Always ask yourself and then document it in the ticket - who is the customer, what are they trying to do, what can’t they do and how critical is it in terms of productivity, impact and patient care.

IT Professionalism

My esteemed colleague Ric Mims and I are authoring a Focus Book on IT Professionalism. I am reaching out to service and support community for quotes and lessons learned from your experiences around the topic of professionalism. I have attached the article that Ric and I did that will be used as the introduction to the Focus Book.

Download the_essence_of_professionalism.pdf

In short, we have seen the eroding of professionalism in the IT service and support arena that we believe is impacting our ability to work more closely with the business. More importantly, it is impacting our ability to reach our potential in terms business credibility and respect. Ric and I would like position the Focus Book as a workbook for managers to help themselves, help their teams and help their IT organizations change the way in which they represent and conduct themselves as they build relationships across the organization.

The areas we are looking to cover are environment/culture, career, values, ongoing education, communication, customer service, image, relationships and work ethic. I value and respect the opinions, experience and thoughts of the service and support community. Please take a moment to share with us a quote, a story, a lesson-learned, experience or your perspective on Professionalism.

Thank you! Pete