The Series So Far: Engagement and Empowerment
In our last post, we continued our series on building your ITSM Dream Team by going through ways to keep your team both engaged and empowered. In today’s installment, we’re going to continue the topic by showing you how to get the most from mobile. We’re also going to give you some pointers on limiting burnout for your techs, the first step in promoting good morale!
The Mobile Era of ITSM
There are an untold number of apps and interfaces that cater to mobile users and the ITSM world is a part of that mix too. With that said, if you’re considering a tool for your ITSM operation, give added weight to tools that incorporate mobile functionality. However, you always want to make sure they aren’t just throwing in mobile features to pay lip service to the mobile community.
For example, if you’re considering a new service desk, go with a mobile responsive browser based app for your safest bet. You won’t run into the hiccups that come with having to support a wide range of finicky mobile OS’s or handsets. You can also avoid the headaches that arise from complex mobile device hardware configurations. Without that dead weight dragging down your front line reps, you’re free focus on the primary goal of your service desk - resolving tickets!
If you position your service desk to take advantage of the best aspects of the mobile era yet avoid new technical debt, you’re on the right path! The BYOD movement can play a role here too but be careful. If you are spinning up a BYOD program for your ITSM pro’s, first think through its effect on your existing service desk policies and procedures.
Avoid “Always On” With Your ITSM Pro’s
The genius of supporting mobile interactions is that you are increasing your availability when out in the field, which is great for customer satisfaction rates, but your service desk team is impacted too. There are certainly conveniences that come with mobile but it can be a double edged sword for your IT pro’s as evidenced here.
The key is to strike a balance between being responsive to your customers, and making your team a slave to your system. The last thing you want is for your ITSM Dream Team to burnout or to start cringing when they hear the ding of their mobile notifications. Here are a couple of suggestions to help you combat burnout and employee churn:
- Fully configure and take advantage of your service desk’s auto assignment features.
- If your system offers you the ability to route based on the problem being reported and the skill your techs, that’s a plus but make sure you build in some redundancy and overlap too. For every potential problem that might come into your service desk, there needs to be a least 2 team members (at a minimum) who can handle the low level triage aspect.
- For commonly reported issues, consider routing those in a round robin fashion or institute load balancing in order to keep things on an even keel from a workload standpoint.
- Review performance reports on a weekly basis for each of your auto assignment groups. If you notice that an individual (or an entire group) is trending upwards in their first response times, use that as a trigger to investigate further.
- Keep in mind that your level 2 and level 3 techs are often handed complex issues that require more time and effort to resolve. That extra effort can lead to frustration and stress on their part so consider rotating them “off the line” for an interval if their performance starts to falter.
- This may seem obvious but if you’re running a 24/7 support operation, make sure that you’ve scheduled your staff to allow for the highest availability during the busiest times of day for newly reported issues.
Be open about this framework with your ITSM Dream Team too! By incorporating these suggestions, you’re demonstrating your commitment to them.
Also, your team can be a resource in finding new ways to combat burnout so keep an open dialogue with them in terms of their pain points and encourage them to come up with possible solutions.
Next Up
In our next installment we’re going to probe deeper on the morale factor for your team. I’ll give you some actionable things you can start using right away to increase collaboration and improve your conflict resolution process. I’m also going to walk you through a new method for performance reviews that is making the “annual” review a thing of the past.
As always, keep us posted with your thoughts and feedback on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn!
