Is it possible to predict the future of the Service Desk?

On Wednesday 18th January the good folk at BrighTalk arranged a Service Desk Summit.

I have selected two presentations from the day which resonated with me.

Future of the Service Desk – Get Social, Stay Relevant

Crystal Miceli (first 13 mins) & Bill Riley

Social Service Desk – Adding social media channels to self service

Today, it’s about serving your customers across different channels, whether it’s web-based, online chat, mobile, social media like twitter or email because they are unlikely to pick up the phone.

New Service Desk Model attributes –

multi channel support

RSS feed subscription, forums, chatter

open lines of communication

collaborative knowledge capture and dissemination

and voice of the social customer drives new service development.

Service Desk 2.0

Brightalk webcast

Presentation Slides

James Finister (TCS)

A workforce that works seamlessly across platforms and that blurs the divide between private and corporate IT.

• wants IT delivered on its own terms
• will informally leverage social media and web based services to reduce their own workload

The goal of support is to provide value by helping customers to use services to do their jobs.

Self service and peer support become the default support mechanisms.

Tools will have to facilitate greater communication with other products.

Things we need to unlearn:

• SD activity targets

• The language of ITIl

• The importance of process

• Service Desk as SPOC

• The SD has all the answers

To what extent did the Brighttalk – Service Desk Summit provide a look into the future?

For me, these two presentations soared to the mountain peak whilst others remained in the safe environment of base camp.

Crystal Miceli and James Finister know what good looks like.  They are prepared to raise their heads above the parapet and provide a distinctive point of view.

So what other viewpoints are out there?

The Future Of The Service Desk Requires A “Customer-Savvy” Approach

John Rakowski – Forrester

Service desk professionals now operate in a business environment in which their end users or customers are “tech savvy.” This leads to a potential conflict spark point where IT customers believe that they have more IT know-how than the service desk.

The service desk and IT as a whole has to focus on becoming “customer savvy” to embrace these pressures.  Customer savvy starts firmly with the soft skills of I&O professionals. Simply, it is the ability to listen to your users/customers and to take on board their IT service suggestions.  Secondly, it is then the ability to apply your IT knowledge and experience to these suggestions from a risk, cost, and potential competitive perspective.

Jeff Weinstein (RightAnswers) adds – At the heart of a customer savvy service desk is the challenge for the team to really be on the pulse of its users and know how to address issues in proactive as well as reactive ways.

What Will the IT Help Desk of the Future Look Like?

John Paul Titlow

We’re already seeing clues about the future of the IT help desk today. The workforce is beginning to become more distributed and mobile, while the nature and number of devices people use day-to-day changes rapidly.

The trend toward socially infused customer support probably has only a limited relevance to company IT departments, whose “customers” are really internal staff.

Not only is the nature of the workforce itself becoming more mobile, but so too are the tools used by IT staff to fix problems. We’re already seeing really solid mobile and tablet apps for things like help desk software, remote desktop support, accessing servers via SSH or FTP and managing networks, to name a few. As smartphones and especially tablets become more ubiquitous and powerful, we can realistically expect to see even more robust administrative tools built for them

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/21028044]

In the future, it may not just be tablets and smartphones, but other connected devices as well. As the Web continues to grow outside of its original desktop boundaries, the list of devices IT departments need to support could grow as well. Anything that connects to the Internet and has a potential professional use is something that IT staff will at least need to be familiar with, even if they’re not fully supporting it

  

Next Generation of BMC Remedyforce Goes Social with Chatter

“Since it was introduced at Dreamforce, Remedyforce has helped IT departments of all sizes achieve greater success using social, mobile and open, cloud technologies,” said George Hu, executive vice president, salesforce.com. “BMC and salesforce.com are helping to automate the social enterprise by providing the leading IT help desk app in the industry built on Force.com.”

  

Goodbye service desk, hello to the collaborative IT support

Matt Rigby

Social IT support – what is it and how does it work? –

While traditional IT support is built on a closed “one-to-one” communication between you and your service desk, social IT support is built on an open “one-to-many” communication between you and your community

It’s relatively easy to introduce social IT into your business.  Since most, if not all of your employees or colleagues will already understand the concepts of social media through their use of platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, all you need to do is enable these ways of working within the workplace.  There are a growing number of social IT service management platforms emerging, either built entirely on the concepts of social media, or integrating some of these concepts to enable organisations to embrace this new way of working.

“Service Desk 2017”

“Lots of interest in @sdi_institute up and coming paper on Service Desk 2017.

If you’ve a view of the future get in touch if I forgot to ask!” @howardkendall

 

“Anatomy of the Service Desk”

LANDesk & the SDI are compiling a new whitepaper for 2012 –

The paper will look at how ITSM professionals spend their time, biggest time drains, and levels of pressure, while suggesting ways to improve service desk time-management and productivity.

Can you hear me now?  The future of the Service Desk.

ITSM Weekly The Podcast (Episode 63) -Service Desk of the Future 1 Of 5

Chris Dancy, Matthew Hooper and Matt Beran (twitter #ITSMWP) if you have the stamina to sit through 5 episodes!

MyPredictions for the “Service Desk” of the future

Will there be a Service Desk in the future?

The current view of the service desk as a single point of contact for users will not endure.  There will be virtualised operations from multiple locations with no concept of a centralised function.  This formation will become the default model in the short term to achieve cost savings through less facilities overheads – Telephony, Buildings etc. 

Where required to do so, service personnel will be spread across geographies to provide Follow the Sun coverage.

The Service Desk will need to transform into a Customer Interaction Capability that maintains the channel of the customer’s choice with little requirement for human voice interaction.

Non-voice technology – multi-channels – will enable users / customers to communicate just as easily in any format as they do by voice. 

In the future more and more customer interactions will occur on the go to help keep track of information from cradle to grave.

“Phablets” Smartphones / tablets will be aware when utility (fit for use) is sub-optimal and will communicate directly with the SaaS product in the Cloud     

The future is about the Customer Experience. So can the Customer Interaction Capability keep up with their demanding expectations for instant gratification?

What will the new Customer Interaction Capability be called?  

Mult-Channel Service Centre, Service Interaction Centre, Service Storefront… 

Have your say – @WDGLL or whatdoesgoodlooklike@gmail.com