6 Ways Digital Experience Impacts the Service Desk

6 Ways Digital Experience Impacts the Service Desk

We now live in a world of anytime, anyplace, anywhere access to data and services, with instant gratification the required norm. Consumer-world led mobile and digital experience innovations have permeated the enterprise IT landscape, but how have they impacted the corporate IT service desk?

Starting with mobile usage for standard business applications – if your company is anything like the audience of our recent webinar with Chris Marsh, Research Director of Business Mobility at 451 Research, then it has definitely seen an increase in mobile working and the need to provide and support mobile access to business applications such as email.

But this just skims the surface of the sea of change affecting the IT organization and its service desk, as evidenced by the following macro trends identified by 451 Research.

According to Chris, innovations in digital experience are a significant driver of enterprise technology change. With the macro trends including that:

  • End users are looking for more personalized, contextualized experiences – 60% value the ability to control and personalize their experience.
  • End users demand a choice in the channel of engagement – 76% prefer digital channels to communicate with businesses.
  • Consumers are looking for mobile loyalty reward programs based on engagement with brands and companies – 50% would strongly recommend a company if it has mobile loyalty programs that offered rewards.

Chris also stated that, “We’re seeing the redefinition of how and where work gets done, how goods are exchanged, and how we think of things like peer-to-peer trust and reciprocity.”

End users now expect an elevated experiences

In 2017, people consistently expect advancements in their consumer digital experiences, and the same is true at work. And, as such, organizations need to harness the power of digital transformation for better consumption, transactional, productivity, and collaborative experiences for all their “customers” – whether these customers/consumers are external customers, partners, or employees.

How companies compete is no longer just about the physical products and services they offer. It’s now also about how these things and the services that wrap them – such as pre- and post-sales support – are delivered, especially through new forms of digital experience and digital interaction. Given the elevated expectations, mobile and digital innovations are definitely not just “nice to haves.”

Two important aspects for corporate IT organizations to consider are:

  • Offering intelligent and personalized apps. In terms of mobile, these are apps through which data and insight connect users with the right information and processes. With better experiences created through greater automation, artificial intelligence (AI), contextualization, and the right delivery infrastructure.
  • Providing meaningful data for users and admins alike. This is how companies see, capture, and secure data. How they understand, manage, and orchestrate data in and out of apps. And how they deliver data in meaningful ways to users.

Ultimately, it’s all about allowing data to flow across the IT infrastructure – to deliver insights in consumable forms across all points of user interaction.

These trends impact the corporate IT service desk on many fronts. Thus, this list could quite easily be four times as long if time and blog-length permitted it:

  1. Meeting service desk agent expectations – service desk personnel want (and need) to be mobile enabled – they’re no different to any other type of knowledge worker. Whether this is being able to remotely access tickets, view mobile dashboards, or get important notifications while on the move.
  2. Efficiently managing mobile deployment/onboarding – workforce mobile enablement can be a challenge for the service desk. It requires a formalized and technology-enabled approach that encompasses detailed workflows, the automated deployment of custom mobile apps, user training, etc. to ensure the now-expected digital experience is delivered.
  3. Leveraging the ability to benefit from context – a key advantage of mobile is context, with sensors and devices delivering contextual and environmental information that can enrich and improve both business and service desk operations.
  4. Needing to scale up for the Internet of Things (IoT) – instrumenting workplace supply chains and user experience with IoT technology will create a new workload for the service desk. With the number of IoT devices adding thousands, and potentially tens of thousands, of new end points to manage and support.
  5. Influencing business change – as the service desk gathers more and more data, from IoT devices in particular, it will be able to play a more important role in steering business, operational, and product-related change.
  6. Extending beyond IT to enterprise service management – the rising employee expectations of services and support are not limited to IT. Other lines of business such as HR, customer care, and facilities also need to improve, with the sharing of IT service management (ITSM) and service desk best practice a good way to deliver a better service experience.

If you want to hear more from Chris, and 451 Research, on how mobile and the digital experience are disrupting the corporate IT service desk, then please watch the webinar replay here. If you want to know more about the role you should be playing in the enablement of an enterprise digital workplace, and the part mobility plays within it, please download this free Gartner report: Make Mobile Part of Your Digital Workplace Strategy

Katie McKenna
Senior Digital Marketing Manager at EasyVista

Katie McKenna is the Digital Marketing Manager at EasyVista, managing all aspects of social media and the company’s web presence. She enjoys learning and sharing all things ITSM, IoT, SaaS, and IT Consumerization.

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