We’ve all done this. We find a techie who’s a gun at solving problems; they’re fast, polite and efficient. They’re our go-to guy or gal. Whenever we have a problem, we always ask for John and Kristy.

If you’re a Service Delivery Manager (SDM) or IT Manager (ITM) with a room full of techs, this can be frustrating.

Poor John gets swamped from the kick-off while the other staff coast through their day. John is proud to be appreciated by his clients, but some days it feels like a heart attack is just waiting in the wings. It’s tough.

Meanwhile, those who’ve become accustomed to John’s magic touch refuse to deal with other techs, leading to a backlog of increasingly frustrated clients going unattended due to the long wait times.

There are two common themes with high-demand techs:

1. They provide excellent customer service.
2. They know their tech, and know it well!

Some secondary reasons compound the problem:

1. They provide consistent results.
2. They deliver on time.
3. They prioritize the work.

How do you improve service desk performance?

So as the SDM or ITM, how can you break the bottleneck and balance the workload? Typically, high performing techies are not very effective trainers nor are they great at documenting processes. So asking them to do either won’t achieve results.

If you look at the first two reasons, only one refers to the technical ability of the techie. The other relates to their personality and their work ethic – something that’s very hard to teach.

To improve the knowledge of the tech team, you can start by building decision trees for fixing common issues.

How can a decision tree be converted to a set of rules?

An excellent way to achieve this is to have your techie write down precisely what they do to resolve their most common support issues. Pass this on to a process analyst and have them translate this into a decision tree that anyone can follow.

The secondary reasons rest in two areas – following processes/procedures, and time management.

With respect to processes and procedures, building decision trees for the team to follow ensures everyone delivers consistently.

And as for time management, it comes down to ensuring the service desk software can provide this functionality – from timing and benchmarking common tasks to rostering team members efficiently.

On first blush, this might seem challenging – and it is. But it certainly needn’t be.

Start by hiring staff based on their personality and work ethic, and then implement an effective software solution like ServiceTree to bring structure, efficiency, automation and oversight to your operation.

This approach will transform your service desk and deliver a real and measurable competitive advantage.