Help Desk Software IT

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One of the challenges in implementing ITIL in established organisations is that they already have processes and procedures in place for the business. A new company or division of a company however is in a position to determine the services required from IT, agree service levels with the business and then implement them.
Even though some established organisations have Service Level Agreements in place, ITIL can give suggestions and guidelines to enhance the service provided.
Many organisations have processes in place – many of these having evolved from verbal to paper to system based agreements.
Often implementing a service management software system can be the opportunity to review those processes and put improvements in place based on ITIL. Sometimes it may be as simple as sticking with the process that is working and automating parts of it.
If you are coming from a paper-based system, one of the huge advantages you get immediately from putting in a service desk software tool is that you will get some level of automation. How quickly you can implement and make process gains depends on how easily configured the system is. You need to be able to change rules and change work flows easily depending on feedback from the business.
A flexible system is far easier to automate. The key to good management of a help desk solution is to be able to choose your processes and workflows that are repetitive, automate them and free up your resources for more skilled work. Successful automation allows you to restructure your resources so that you can place lower skilled resources on the front line that pass issues that cannot be resolved quickly to more skilled people.
The first challenge is to define what services you will provide. This is the same whether it is an internal business unit or external customers. Understanding what is needed to provide that service then naturally flows. For example, how many resources are needed? If there are problems or the service needs to be changed, how will I respond?
Once services are defined, service level agreements (SLA) must be established and these set expectations. For many customers, the SLA is often “yesterday or as soon as possible”. The challenge for IT is in understanding all the parts needed to provide that service. What is often overlooked is the flow on agreements that must be in place. You need to understand who are your partners and suppliers that are involved in the service chain and how will they meet your requirements before agreeing to any SLA with the business.
Agreeing service levels without knowing all the facts to deliver a service is a recipe for failure, but unfortunately this is all too common.
For example, if you are providing an email service, supported by an email server. In the event of server failure, your agreement with your supplier is to fix or replace within 24 hours. However, if your customer needs their email back within 1 hour, there is a high likelihood that you will be 23 hours outside of your SLA. In this case, other resources must be considered, such as a backup email server. With the additional server, the cost to provide your email service must increase – based on your customer requirement. The decision then is placed back on your customer with the facts of providing the service. Traditionally, your customers might have had the view that “it just needs to be working” and disregard the cost to deliver the service.
This puts the focus and onus back onto the business: “if I want this, then I have to pay this much for it”. Traditionally, business/customers say “but this should just happen, I’m the customer and it just needs to work”. But they’re not looking at how much they are paying for that service. ITIL best practice highlights the need to get the facts before making any commitments.
Communication between IT and your customers is vital. Merely looking at the business / IT interfaces without going back through the components of the service chain is not good practice. Today, as businesses evolve and more stringent needs are required, process reviews are taking place and agreements renegotiated with customers.

Implementing a service management software tool, getting the facts over time primarily will give you an excellent ITIL service desk implementation. Tracking and resolving incidents is one of the major goals of a service desk software solution. However, what you measure, the way you measure, the reports you create and how you interpret the results can bring you help desk best practice.The first priority is to map out your business processes from an incident being reported – where it goes to, who it goes to, what do they do and then the various paths that are taken depending on the incident and what happens after that. The companies with best practices have a lot of up to date documentation available whereas others without the documentation still know what to do with an incident once it is logged. However, does this make the best use of the available information? Are there other opportunities to get more value from the investment made in people and technology?It is very possible that well thought out business processes will help develop staff measurement indicators, create real time, in depth dashboard reporting that give the immediate facts and help make business decisions and respond to critical situations with clear escalation procedures.Staff MeasurementPerformance measurement is fundamental to getting best practice. Often, incident resolution is achieved quickly, but with the help of many of your staff. How do you measure the value each staff member contributes?For example, if you were running statistics on closure rates, the person who opens and closes the incident might get all the closure rates, but the resolution might have actually come from other people. You need to look at how the system is tracking who has worked on what and which piece of data you

Implementing a service management software tool, getting the facts over time primarily will give you an excellent ITIL service desk implementation.  Tracking and resolving incidents is one of the major goals of a service desk software solution. However, what you measure, the way you measure, the reports you create and how you interpret the results can bring you help desk best practice.

The first priority is to map out your business processes from an incident being reported – where it goes to, who it goes to, what do they do and then the various paths that are taken depending on the incident and what happens after that. The companies with best practices have a lot of up to date documentation available whereas others without the documentation still know what to do with an incident once it is logged. However, does this make the best use of the available information? Are there other opportunities to get more value from the investment made in people and technology?

It is very possible that well thought out business processes will help develop staff measurement indicators, create real time, in depth dashboard reporting that give the immediate facts and help make business decisions and respond to critical situations with clear escalation procedures.

Staff MeasurementPerformance measurement is fundamental to getting best practice. Often, incident resolution is achieved quickly, but with the help of many of your staff. How do you measure the value each staff member contributes?   For example, if you were running statistics on closure rates, the person who opens and closes the incident might get all the closure rates, but the resolution might have actually come from other people. You need to look at how the system is tracking who has worked on what and which piece of data you’re going to report on. Knowing this gives you a much clearer way of understanding how well your staff are performing.

Dashboard ReportingDashboard reporting is a growing trend as companies want to understand in real time how they are progressing against their performance benchmarks. Today’s systems allow you to develop graphs and drill down to see what are the underlying records immediately. Dashboards can be made available to service staff, call centre managers and business unit management. For example, a graph can show the currently logged, active or waiting incidents. Everyone in the service value chain can quickly make decisions based on live data, although the view can be different depending on responsibilities.

This capability is very important because the team leader will want to see their team’s current workload and they might have to adjust that workload for each person. People on the front line might have a different view as well, depending on your process.  You may have a closed loop process where an incident comes into a customer service representative person, is resolved by many, but comes back to same representative to deal with the customer. The customer service rep needs to see whether service levels may be breached and will have a graph or an alert so that escalation procedures need to be invoked, priorities changed.

Escalation ProceduresPart of managing your service levels is to have escalation procedures in place. Many service desk software systems have these in built and customer service staff and management follow these procedures based on alerts. These alerts are different for various organisation levels. For example, your dashboard should give you the first idea of the progress of incident resolution. However, if a service level may be breached, a customer service representative might be alerted, if it continues an automatic notification goes to customer service management and then possibly to the business.

Often, a customer service representative waits for the customer to provide additional information to resolve an incident. For example, if a screen shot of an error has been requested and the customer does not respond, then having the ability to “stop the clock” until the information is received gives a more correct indication of how quickly the incident is being resolved. It also allows service desk staff to escalate to the business when the required information has not been given.

To get the best return on your service management software, mapping your business processes so that they are well defined and understood will give you the best chance of achieving best practice. While customer satisfaction with fast and accurate incident resolution is the goal, your business processes will help you better define staff measurement, dashboard reporting for great customer communication and escalation procedures to deal with potential service level breaches quickly and decisively.

One of the best ways to fight fraud is to take a proactive approach. Yet some business professionals believe that fraud detection software is the only type of software tool available (or necessary) to fight fraud. Certainly, detection through monitoring can play an important role in your anti-fraud program, but it puts you in a reactive mode. Instead, you should take efforts to better know the people and companies with whom you choose to do business. In other words, do what you can to help prevent fraud from occurring in the first place. Better anti-fraud programs will combine ongoing due diligence with monitoring, and the place to start is with identity verification tools.
There are a variety of reasons that you should know your customers. First, it is just a good business practice. You can help prevent being associated with deceptive individuals, and that can save you money. Such a relationship can lead to direct losses from the particular business deal, but it can also tarnish your company’s name, sending your good customers scurrying to the competition. Second, knowing your customers allows you to focus on those products or services that best meet your customers’ needs. By doing those activities well, you can build (or enhance) a competitive advantage. In addition, some companies face regulatory requirements to identify their customers. For example, certain financial institutions are subject to regulations calling for Customer Identification Programs (CIP), and certain financial institutions are subject to the new Identity Theft “Red Flags” Rules. Many banks collect documents such as a birth certificate, passport, driver’s license, or some other government-issued ID to help establish a customer’s identity. The risk is that personnel may not be able to spot counterfeit documents or fraudulently obtained physical documents. Ensuring your employees are well trained is critical, but what happens when an unfamiliar identification document is presented to your employee? Clearly, the risk of fraud is higher, and some fraud begins with an employee unknowingly accepting counterfeit documentation.
One of the most popular ways to augment identity verification processes is to compare data provided by the potential customer against public records to see if there are any discrepancies. This “non-documentary method” could be very time consuming if not for software solutions that can help you streamline the process. In fact, using identity verification software, this task can frequently be completed within seconds.
Identity Verification Software
Identity verification software is designed to help you quickly and effectively verify the identity of your prospective retail and commercial account holders. This is your proactive step to preventing fraud: recognize the deceptive individuals before the fraud occurs! ID verification software can also help you investigate possible fraud scenarios by helping you confirm whether your customer is the true owner of a Social Security number (SSN) and by detecting potential synthetic IDs. In addition to the potential for identity verification solutions to confirm a true identity, it also may be configurable to perform a custom hotlist check for individuals that might seek to disguise their identity by using an alias or different address.
Being proactive and performing appropriate due diligence can help reduce your risk of being a victim of those that look to perpetrate identity fraud.