Service Desk Articles

Putting Your ITIL Qualification to Use

8 Tips for Putting Your ITIL Qualification into Practice 

If you’ve just taken your ITIL Foundation Certification exam or if you’ve still to take it and are thinking about how best to use your learning in the workplace, then this article is for you. Take a read of these eight tips for putting your new ITIL learning into practice.
Benefits of Self-Service

5 Key Benefits of Self-Service for IT

Notwithstanding the fact that a dollar saved by IT through badly-implemented self-service might incur an extra two dollars of costs from an end-user perspective, cost savings are not the only driver for self-service and, for many, it’s not the most important benefit. Here we look at the other additional benefits.
Why & What Change Management Is in ITSM

Why & What Change Management Is in ITSM: Purpose, Definitions, and Best Practices

Where does one start when looking at change management or change control as it’s now known in ITIL 4? It can be very daunting at the outset, but the steps outlined in this article should help to get you started, along with example KPIs to help you measure your success.
XLAs: Rethinking End-User KPIs for ITSM

From SLAs to XLAs: Rethinking End-User KPIs for ITSM

Are you still using the same old metrics, key performance indicators, and reactive processes to manage new and modern technologies? It’s time to broaden the scope of your metrics towards XLAs, here David D’Agostino looks at why and how to move past traditional SLAs.
Service Desk User Journey

How to Map the Service Desk User Journey for Better User Experiences

Providing a quality customer experience means devising a plan and sticking with it, but doing so requires a little customer journey mapping. Here Nancy Van Elsacker Louisnord looks at the key steps for getting started with mapping your customer journeys, from the right questions to ask, to creating user personas.
Visual Asset Dependency Mapping

6 Benefits of Visual Asset Dependency Mapping

Want to know more about visual asset dependency mapping? If so, then this article is for you. Please read on to find out more about why it’s essential for your datacenter along with the required steps – starting with the auto-discovery of assets – including six key benefits it delivers.
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.
The future of ITSM 2019

The Future of ITSM – Survey Results 2019

This article shares the findings of our 2019 Future of ITSM survey, which covered 13 questions on topics such as ITSM best practice and new technologies. Key findings include that 84% of respondents think that working in IT will get harder over the next three years! Click-through for the full report, no sign up required.
AI Service Desk

What Service Desk Managers Should Know About AI

Because AI is rapidly changing many of the ITSM operations and tasks we deal with regularly, the time is ripe for disruption of the IT service desk industry. To help explain “the art of the AI possible,” this article looks at the key areas that service desk managers need to understand about AI.
5 Ways to Improve Your IT Service Desk

5 Ways to Improve Your IT Service Desk

This article looks at 10 common challenges faced by IT service desks (equally applicable in enterprise service management scenarios) and how you can use them to identify and progress a number of opportunities to improve.
Software Maintenance

ITIL 4’s ITAM Practice and Software Support

With ITAM now considered part of ITIL 4 best practice, this article helps with a process that might not be considered as a core SAM capability, but should be in place if your organization wants to make best use of the valuable asset data at its disposal – the Software Support and Maintenance Review process.
ITIL 4

Knock, Knock – Who’s There? ITIL 4 … ITIL for Who?

While many will notice the 34 ITIL 4 practices vs ITIL v3’s 26 processes, there are other potentially more important points to note with the updated ITIL best practice. For instance, the greater focus on people, and the inclusion of governance in the new ITIL 4 Service Value System (SVS). Here, Paul Wilkinson takes a look.
ITSM Data Issues

Will Your ITSM Data Issues Deliver Bad Experiences and Bad Bots?

In this article, we consider whether your average ITSM team is able to really take advantage of the opportunities that digital transformation, customer experience, and AI technologies offer. Specifically, to help you to better understand if your ITSM team is suitably positioned to deliver against the business requirements that are necessitating this increased exploitation of technology and data.
Improve Your IT Service Desk FCR

5 Steps to Improve Your IT Service Desk FCR

Maximizing the First Call Resolution (FCR) KPI (if used correctly) can deliver significant benefits to an organization, especially in optimizing the cost per contact, minimizing time to resolve, and improving customer satisfaction. Here we explain how.
Customer satisfaction

4 Ways to Increase Your IT Service Desk’s Customer Satisfaction Scores

This article shares a number of proven tips that can dramatically improve your customer satisfaction survey scores. They’re all relatively simple and can be easily adopted by your IT service desk to achieve the results you want with your customers. Take a look here.