The Service Desk as the Eyes and Ears of the Organisation

The service desk is the eyes and ears of the organisation because it sees how services really perform: when a back-office process fails, fulfilment fails and the desk receives the resulting incidents and complaints. John Sansbury argues that this purpose should be reflected in how the desk is managed.

• In normal times users submit service and information requests; some are handled to completion by the desk and others trigger back-office processes. Failures elsewhere surface at the desk.
• Around the 1960s and 70s, service centres were typically called the Complaints Department and later Customer Service, which made fixing incidents a routine task focused on customer management rather than investigating the cause.
• Two simple initiatives bear fruit quickly: new IT starters spend their first few weeks on the service desk, and IT managers listen to service desk calls for an hour or two a month, via call records or sitting alongside an analyst.
• Users form their opinion of a provider mainly from first-line support when something goes wrong or they need something. Scandinavian Airlines called these interactions 'Moments of Truth': get them right and the experience is positive and memorable; get them wrong and people hold it against you for a long time.
• Yet first-line staff are typically the lowest paid, least valued and most stressed team, with the highest sickness and turnover, despite being the people by whom service provision is judged.