The service desk isn't here right now

It seems to me that a Service Desk should be able to take time out for professional development and team building.

As a manager, one of my greatest frustrations was getting the right professional development for my staff. My greatest frustration was keeping them on it once booked. Many people seem to treat other colleagues' training as the lowest priority. I constantly battled demands to pull my team off training and related activities for something "more important".

Many service desk teams that I deal with are small enough that it is not cost effective to run a course twice for them, i.e. there is less than ten or twelve of them. So what happens is that a skeleton staff mans the service desk and misses out on the course while the rest of the team attends it. Likewise when I run workshops to gather input from a team or to socialise ideas with them, only half of them are there. It is very frustrating and counter-productive.

Similarly with team-building exercises. I struggle to understand how you can do team building without all the team on it. At the simplest level, all teams should get together as a group on a regular basis. But service desk teams seldom do: a subset stay back to man the phones.

When I managed a service desk we didn't work that way. When we had a (weekly) team meeting, someone from tech support manned the phones and explained politely that

  • The team weren't there right now: they were attending to team-building and training activities
  • Was the request something that could wait until X o'clock when they would be back?
  • If not,the person would call in a service desk staff member
  • Otherwise they would log the details and queue it

It was rare that a user had an issue with this. And very few requests couldn't wait an hour or three, including most incidents. Most users are very understanding when it is explained to them why none of the regular staff are there: they respect the fact that people need time together and time on training.

I think that too many service desk managers and their superiors think that a service desk needs to be live at all times. In most organisations I don't consider that to be necessary, especially in smaller teams where it is inefficient to do things twice. If you are one of those people who think that way, think again: consider the merits of a polite "The service desk isn't here right now, may we take your message and call you back?"

Comments

Use weekends

I've found myself with the same problem in the past. The solution we arrived was to organize a "service desk weekend". Pay a hotel for them and family for Saturday to Sunday. Half the time is used for teaching and coaching. The other half is as a reward for the job. You can easily set 4 to 8 ours of sessions.
My experience with this options was very positive.

weekend retreat

A weekend retreat may work occasionally but of course

  • it's expensive
  • it ought to be optional, which defeats the whole purpose
  • as a work-life balancer I won't tell you what I think of employers who help themselves to my weekends
  • it isn't going to work on a regular basis, e.g, for team meetings
  • doesn't address my core point, which is that it is okay to do it on a weekday - we shouldn't have to go to these lengths

Might be ok but..

It might be ok to do it on a weekday - depends on the business' tolerance for service degradation, and the risk of course is if they can tolerate it for one day you'll lose every future resource argument.

I don't think this is an issue reserved for service desks; all service environments suffer from it and it's a challenge that probably doesn't have a single solution. Pre- or post-shift team meetings can work, scheduled out of hours events (doesn't need to be away days, could simply be a meeting in a pub followed by a social). July/August presents not altogether unrelated challenges.

Where there is call for whole days out, such as for training, you can do this in two batches and supplement the service desk with 2nd/3rd line peeps. It's a practice I always felt had great value in terms of reminding the 2nd/3rd liners about customer focus, and indeed demonstrating just what a skill dealing with users at first line actually is.

I think the underlying issue we still need to address is an undervaluing of the role of the service desk and the people operating it. To me it's the one place you can daily influence the perception of your users and customers, and yet because it's often a relatively early stop on people's careers it's looked down upon. Millions are spent on PR every year, and yet...

precious

The first call resolution goes to near zero for that time, but overall I dont think service is always seriously degraded. I want a new pc. That can't wait 2 hours to process? Of course it depends on the company and the criticality etc but I think we are way too precious about this.

On a tangent, but I believe there is a real trend towards more support professionals: people who see service desk as a career not a stepping stone to one.

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