The early part of my career included a solid stint in the QSR (Quick Service Restaurant) industry. Today, my company has more than 17 years of QSR support under its belt, and we presently manage over 16,000 devices.

It’s fair to say, then, that we know the industry pretty well.

So what does the QSR industry have to do with an IT service provider? Not much to be honest…

But the learnings from the QSR industry have been very powerful in building a rostering system within ServiceTree, to ensure that a Service Delivery Manager (SDM) is able to focus on the team, rather than tickets.

But why should you consider the use of rosters for your tech team? The reason is service delivery. With the aid of rosters, an SDM can allocate work to individual techs based not just on their skill set but different activity types, too.

With the aid of rosters, the SDM can ensure they don’t get mired in the day-to-day running of the service desk. They can deliver better service to their clients.

Here are some ways a roster can help a busy service desk plough through tickets and keep customers happy:

• It’s easier to manage a fast-paced and constantly changing workload.
• The team effectively multi-tasks, while techs work on individual tickets.
• Team members respond based on a combination of criterion rather than simply ticket urgency.
• It ensures work activities are balanced out, and that all activities are completed. Remember, techs will never do what they don’t want to do, but if you drip-feed the work to them, they remain focused on the one task that’s right in front of them.
• You can allocate your tech support resources more effectively in advance
• Generate reports and push that data straight into payroll
• Restrict a team member’s working times

If it all sounds great, but the idea of rostering your team sounds daunting, it might be time to look at ServiceTree.