People Articles

Customer experience CX

Experience Matters: 9 CX and ITSM Nuggets from Refresh19

In IT we need to go further than the mindset of “supporting the people, not the IT” to be more focused on the business-level outcomes achieved through what we do in IT. This article which offers up some of the key learning points from Refresh19 London – a Freshworks customer event – aims to help you achieve this.
Better Customer Service

IT Service Desk Improvement: 3 Tips for Better Customer Service

This article offers up three tips for better customer service – with these applicable to IT professionals who are either offering service and support to their business colleagues or the same to customers in other companies, i.e. via external customer support or managed service provision.
Well-being and Mental Health

Improve IT Support’s Well-being and Mental Health

The service desk can be a stressful environment. The sheer number of calls – and the potentially stressful nature of those calls – can progressively affect agents and their wellbeing. This article looks at possible wellbeing issues on the service desk and offers advice on how to best tackle, or ideally, prevent them.
Mental Health Issues

Mental Health Issues Often Need Actions Over Words

In the latest in our series of wellbeing articles, Phil Green provides insight into the impact of mental health issues and offers advice on what’s needed to help those suffering to improve their lives – with the aim of getting you to think differently about mental health and how best to help others if they’re suffering.
Well-being Issues

Well-being Issues – When You’ve the Inability to Feel Pleasure

In the second of our wellbeing articles, Ian Stock offers advice based on his personal experiences of wellbeing and mental health; including understanding “anhedonia” – a word that doesn’t seem to be widely known (unlike hedonism). Read more here.
ITSM Trends for 2019

The 5 Hottest ITSM Trends and Topics for 2019

Find out what ITSM professionals would like information on, and help with, in 2019 based on our recent reader poll; and get an idea of where the ITSM industry is looking, and potentially heading, in the year ahead. The results are relatively different to those of 2018!
ITSM and Customer Journeys

Improve Customers Experience with Customer Journeys

Want to deliver excellent services? Want to start improving customer experience, but have no clue where to start? As with anything related to your customers, it’s often best to start with the customers and their journey(s) – so take a look at these five actions to help you on the road to success.
People-Related Tips for ITSM

10 People-Related Tips for ITSM Success

Here Paul Wilkinson covers the things that can help IT organizations to traverse the people-related issues and barriers to success – sharing a list of 10 critical success factors, crafted as tips, for dealing with the ABC of IT. The only questions is: how much of this are you already doing?
Mental Health and Well-being

Mental Health and Well-being in IT – a Personal Account

There’s a big focus on mental wellbeing in IT right now, but we still seem to be struggling to break away from “the stigma” related to the “darker” side of mental health. To hopefully help others to speak out, Stephen Mann has written about his personal experiences with work-related stresses.
ITSM and “Good Skills”

Does Your IT Organization Have the “Good Skills”?

This article by Matthew Burrows focuses on the state of skills, using the Digital Skills Landscape 2018 report, from SkillsTx and BSMimpact, to highlight the current state of skills availability in IT. Are we overly humble in our opinion of our skills or is it the reverse?
Changing ITSM

Changing ITSM – Let’s Talk Customers, AI, and Mental Health

In this article, Sophie Danby looks back at a recent industry conference and uses it as a platform to discuss the changing face of ITSM, the ever-growing importance of customer service, the industry focus on Artificial Intelligence, and why we – in ITSM – need to focus more on the darker side of mental health.
The Top 10 People Issues of ITSM

The Top 10 People Issues of ITSM (and the ABC of IT)

Best practice adoption failure is often blamed on tools and processes, but in reality these failures are actually caused by people issues. It’s not just limited to best practice though, here Paul Wilkinson looks at the top ten people-related barriers to ITSM success.
Handling Customer Complaints

5 Simple “Don’ts” for Handling Customer Complaints

Here Stephen Mann takes his latest negative customer experience and turns it into five simple, but practical, pieces of advice for anyone (whether they be in internal or external support) to follow when handling a customer complaint.
How Important is ITIL, and Other Certifications

How Important is ITIL, and Other Certifications, to IT Service Desk Staff?

How relevant is ITIL right now, especially for IT service desks and service desk agents? If you want some hot-off-the-press insight, new research data from HDI – in its 2018 Technical Support Practices & Salary Report – offers two perspectives on the value of ITIL certification to North American service desk agents.
IT Stakeholder Management and Communications

5 Steps for Better IT Stakeholder Management and Communications

There’s one major area of IT that unlike the rest isn’t clearly defined — the people. And it’s why effective stakeholder management is so vital to your IT success. Here we dig into what stakeholder management is and provide a simple, five-step framework to help manage your stakeholders more effectively.