Service Desk Structures by Anticlue

Having a service desk is just a great way to provide enhanced customer service. However, like everything else an organization needs to analyze its expectations and requirements before deciding on the type of service desk structure. There are three types of a service desk to apply local, central, and virtual.

Local
Local Service Desks are setup at each site. So if you have a site in Maine, Boston, and Albany, each site would have a service desk. This structure works well in a highly distributed IT environment. Some key recommendations when setting up a local service desk are to assure common processes are applied across locations, measure the same metrics for management reports, and use a shared database across all locations.

Central
Central Service Desks are setup at one site. So for our example of having a site in Maine, Boston, and Albany, only one location would have a service desk. All requests would be logged to that central location. An advantage is that this structure enables a one call for all IT support structure. Some lessons learned with implementations of this type are that clearly identifying the business need is a must. If the business needs to be supported during the graveyard shift, having a help desk that only functions during daytime hours isn’t very helpful. Therefore having expectations clearly set and agreed to is a necessary component of this implementation. Another lesson learned is that a good marketing campaign is a vital component of the implementation. The target audience are the customers, users, and internal IT staff. Finally it is a good idea to have training sessions with IT staff on service to assure customer satisfaction and more important customer loyalty.

Virtual
Virtual Service Desks are setup through telecommunications and networking technology so location is unimportant. A one call for all is used, but routing is done via rules applied with the technology. Since virtual service desks can realistically have employees from India, US, and Germany deciding on a central language for entering the information is important, also having IT support on site at the physical location.

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