The Ultimate Service Desk is Self-Healing

Customer in Focus

For two years in a row, OGD’s service desk came in first for end user support in one of the largest outsourcing customer satisfaction surveys. So it’s no surprise that Maarten van der Kleij, head of the Shared Service Desk, has a clear vision on how to lead an effective service desk and how to meet the IT needs of more than 47,000 end users.

OGD IT services is not only a TOPdesk business partner – it is the organization from which TOPdesk developed in the 1990s. The Delft IT service provider’s main goal is simplifying IT and offering technology ‘that just works’. According to OGD, they achieve this with smart people who strive for good, fast solutions to problems, share knowledge, and ‘think people are more important than rules’. OGD currently supports over 450 organizations, and does most of this work from five Dutch branches, including their headquarters in Delft. Another part of the service provision takes place on location. OGD’s service desk is specialized in three types of service: the Shared Service Desk, the exclusive service desk and a service desk on location. The latter two options are customer-specific.

The right operator for every call

Van der Kleij leads the team that serves all OGD’s Shared Service Desk customers. This Delft-based service desk is available 24/7. To ensure they provide the best possible services, the Shared Service Desk is divided into different customer groups. These groups focus on customers from specific branches, for instance, or customers with technical similarities. Van der Kleij says, “With us, a team comprises eight to ten employees who only work for the customers from their customer group. This lets you benefit from the scale advantages of a bigger team while still delivering personal services. Employees really know the people they speak to on the phone, and are familiar with the organization’s culture. When we visit a customer on location, we do so with people from the team.”

Shared Service Desk customers can decide whether to use OGD’s TOPdesk environment or use their own tool. “Customers usually want to work in TOPdesk because collaborating in a single tool is better. It brings us closer to a customer’s work processes. Our TOPdesk environment houses all customers without their own installation, but a TOPdesk environment on location is also a possibility,” says Van der Kleij. OGD uses Anywhere365 to effectively map the stream of calls spread across several TOPdesk environments. Anywhere 365 is a unified contact centre solution for Microsoft Lync that routs incoming calls to the right employees, regardless of their current location. The tool also indicates the TOPdesk environment a customer is in, and whether there are for instance any major calls at that time.

Sebastiaan Mennen, service delivery manager, further explains OGD’s approach. “Ideally we deploy TOPdesk at a customer, because we’re most familiar with that. If we manage a customer’s entire chain, from service desk to management, it’s simply easier to do that in a single tool. TOPdesk is practically part of the organization: everyone has experience with it.” Mennen also mentions that it’s important that end users have a single point of contact. “Everything has to end up with the right person, regardless of call type.” According to OGD, the secret to satisfied end users is primarily having the right service desk staff, supported by the right organization and tool.

Quick responses to any situation

At the Shared Service Desk, employees are linked to a certain experience level. Together with the customer group, this level determines which incoming calls appear on an employee’s screen as an Anywhere365 pop-up. “This lets us quickly route incoming traffic to certain teams when it’s busy,” says Van der Kleij. “We also use a knowledge base linked to both TOPdesk and Anywhere365 so all our information is available to everyone, all the time. This lets us apply TOPdesk’s standard solutions in various customer environments, for instance.” There are various dashboards at OGD’s Shared Service Desk to help them react to telephone peaks. “Certain management information – such as a live display of the number of calls and phone calls at that moment – can be seen on TVs spread throughout the service desk. Other dashboards, such as service level reports, aren’t in the Shared Service Desk. Instead, we use them at set times to see if we have met agreements with our customers.” The combination of these tools lets OGD stay on top of the Shared Service Desk’s performance.

From management department to service desk

Van der Kleij says, “As we support more and more end users, our services become more complex. The number of end users has even doubled in two years’ time. This means that you not only receive more calls, but you also have more employees, support more processes and have to operate in quite a few organizations. For example: we currently manage almost twenty-five TOPdesk environments.” OGD’s approach to managing this complexity has earned them a perfect score – and first place – in the Giarte Outsourcing Performance survey for end user support for two years in a row. Every year Giarte measures the customer satisfaction among all big Dutch IT service providers. According to Van der Kleij, ‘real self-service’ is the biggest topic where there are still plenty of benefits to be reaped. He names change as one of the few constant factors in IT. OGD’s main goal with all these changes is to be of even better service to customers. The market is currently primarily asking for more self-sufficiency for customers. “At OGD, we call this principle ‘shift left’. Shift left means that we want to preventively resolve as much as possible in order to push ‘towards the left of the chain’. You could call it a self-healing system. It ensures end users are helped sooner, or that a problem is avoided. As a result, your user satisfaction improves, but you also need fewer expensive managers and your total IT costs drop.”

“EMPLOYEES KNOW THE PEOPLE THEY SPEAK TO ON THE PHONE,
AND THEY’RE FAMILIAR WITH THE ORGANIZATION’S CULTURE “

Maarten van der Kleij

​Head of the Shared Service Desk

Five service desk tips from OGD

The effectiveness of your services depends on various factors that you must always keep in mind. Maarten van der Kleij, head of the Shared Service Desk at OGD, has five tips to help make your service desk as successful as possible.

• First of all, invest in your service desk: make sure you have the best employees and the best tools. The service desk is the face of your IT department, and therefore has the most effect on your user satisfaction. Providing the best and fastest service possible to your end users can also keep your IT chain costs as low as possible.
• Make sure your end users experience IT as an addition, so that they always remain satisfied. Know what is going on with a user: which processes do they have to deal with, for instance? Something else to take into account is when your service desk should be available. From 9 to 5 simply isn’t enough for many modern organizations.
• Make sure that the service desk remains the owner of each call. A call should not be passed around between operator groups. As long as the service desk maintains operational management of a call, the end users know what their point of contact is. Moreover, it is a useful incentive for calls that have been open for a while.
• Let end users do as much as possible themselves. You can tell a user what needs to be done but letting them do it themselves – or even having it done automatically – is much better for the service desk and the end user.
• Coordinate all technology and tools. Everything should link to and enhance each other. A tool is not a goal in and of itself. “At OGD we use TOPdesk to classify our processes and workflow. We use Anywhere365 to streamline the communication between several TOPdesk environments.”