Are you a tech working at a service desk, or managing the tech team? Ever find yourself getting bored; nothing to do? Nope, didn’t think so. The days of a quiet service desk are long gone!

One of the reasons for this is clients’ ever-increasing dependence on technology. Most businesses expect their staff to work non-official extended business hours via their laptops, phones and tablets.

And coupled with this is an expectation that service desk support should also be available to support these users and their technology during these extended business hours.

So the question is, how do you increase the output of your service desk without succumbing to crazy long hours?

You automate.

I know automation sounds like old news, but if you’ve ever really examined a service desk, you’ll be shocked at how little automation is used in the day to day running of tickets. Most service desks are run within a very manual structure, where techs work on individual tickets from open to close, with zero automation.

It’s a little different with some of the level 3 techs. After all, they’re the king of techies – and some of these guys do automate some of their work. However, it’s normally done as an ‘it would be cool if I could get X to do Y’, rather than a deliberate decision to automate X because it would deliver better, quicker service.

There are two main reasons why service desks are not automated:

1. The business doesn’t see the benefit of service desk automation
2. The software being used by the service does not allow for automation

Still finding it hard to see how you can implement service desk automation?

A common issue in a service desk is that techs select the ticket they want to work on. So although the techs have a queue, or multiple queues to work on – unless the service desk is so quiet that there’s only one ticket in the queue, the tech can still choose the ticket they prefer.

Automating the ticket flow ensures the user can’t pick a ticket. Instead, each ticket is allocated to them automatically, one at a time, based on the priority and urgency.

And here are a couple of ways automation can help customers resolve their own issues without even calling the service desk (providing the software allows it).

A very common ticket is for a password reset. Typically, the user has forgotten their password, and they need a new one immediately.

It’s not uncommon for this to happen at say, 7 pm on a Saturday night. So why not automate it? Let the user (or their supervisor) create a ticket that will reset their password, SMS it to them and log a ticket, recording the event. Simple, right?

Another common one is for print jobs stuck in a print queue. Again, this is a common one outside of business hours. How cool would it be if they could create a ticket and have the system automatically restart the print service for them – even when they are working at home – or in a hotel on the other side of the country?

I think we can call that uber-cool. And yes, it is possible – with ServiceTree!