Technology has completely changed the way we do business business. It doesn’t matter whether you keep your service desk „at home” or outsource it, there are some signs it is high time to change it.
It’s already obvious: legacy IT systems do not fit the rapidly changing business demands. Well, you may even be ready to adopt new technologies, but how can you be certain that your service desk needs changing?
Freshworks, a company offering a cloud-based service desk (freshservice) has prepared a great compilation* of visible signs that will inform you that your current solution can no longer rise up to the expectations.
1. You are paying more than you know
Firstly, apart from paying -the implementation fees, your asset licence fees quickly escalate when you need additional modules. It means you are paying more than you should. Too often these add-ons come with exorbitant implementation fees and slowly but steadily increasing on-going professional services fees. You should pay as you use and there should never be any additional hidden costs.
2. Your service desk is slow to adapt to changes
As Freshworks underlines, legacy systems are often too complex for today’s agile and fast changing business world. Without in-house consultants and developers, you may struggle to manage implementations and ongoing changes. If every upgrade becomes a big project requiring substantial resources and consuming 3-6 months of your time, it means your service desk is too complicated.
3. You have bought too complex product
You need to analyse whether your legacy system does not contain any features you will never use. Make sure you do not pay for unnecessary modules, features and sub features. It may cost you not only the money, but also create mind boggling complexity for your team, which may lead to slower or limited adoption and frustrate agents and end-users.
4. Employees love to hate your desk
If, let’s say, a year after the implementation, agents’ fatigue is high and user adoption rates are extremely low, there are some possible reasons:
- Your service desk is available, but not accessible: the IT portal is not accessible on mobile devices, it is hard to find and creates barriers between end-users and the IT team, limiting adoption of the service desk.
- If your organization struggles to manage the simplest workflow changes, you require external consultants to implement additional workflow changes or new features, it means that something is definitely wrong. Technology and processes cannot be more important than people.
- Your service-desk is not designed to be intuitive and user-centric. If the interface is full of clunky, complicated features and multiple calls-to-action, your service desk agents hate you for sure, as they have to spend hours struggling with the system every day.
5. Business considers IT a support function
Last but not the least, remember that IT must be a part of your business in order to create business value. Teams must be brought together on a unified service desk, with a single window which improves their operations. HR, finance, facilities and operations teams need a simple service that helps them collaborate on complex requests like employee onboarding. You need a service desk that is agile and built to make a difference across functions and processes. With zero scripting and no external consultants.
So, time for change?
*White paper: „5 signs it’s time to change your IT service desk”.
