Call Centre disadvantages: The Digital Channel Service Desk imperative

AI initiatives might mean you have a portal-first strategy that's now more important than ever before. Flow Management is the means to maximise portal uptake, without user resistance and with nothing but advantages.

The Principle

Activity Prioritisation (AP) is surrounded by many good practice principles for IT support, unprecedented in not having previously been formally identified. One is that all urgent support needs must be identified and quickly handled, even if for only one person unable to do something essential. Of course, this outcome is an operational necessity.

The Universal Problem

The problem is that ordinarily, an IT organisation's approach for channeling and prioritising support does not provide for the outcome, even when sought through a Service Desk's Call Centre.

Of 16 disadvantages intrinsic of using and operating a Call Centre, listed below, five harm an IT organisation's ability to reliably meet urgent needs, highlighted in red bold. Although the Call Centre's primary purpose is to handle urgent support because all other needs are better suited to the portal and other digital channels, reliability falls well short, so the principle cannot manifest in reality. Of course, being unable to reliably meet urgent needs is inadequate service.

The Solution

Portal Purposing is one of three primary aspects of Flow Management. Portal Purposing incorporates five capabilities, one of which is to capture and meet urgent needs.

The urgent needs principle is met for the first time, and it is met not only through the portal but through the Call Centre too. Furthermore, with the five capabilities replacing almost any need or preference to phone for support, a repositioned Call Centre means that all of its 16 inherent operational disadvantages are removed.

Although the five capabilities have not been recognised as being functional requirements and so the vital situations that they handle have been either completely unmanaged or weakly managed, the incidence and demand for them is high, especially because many staff often aren't at their desk and so need to coordinate support for a convenient time. They are good examples of why support's process has been so inadequate in being focused on the wrong thing.

AP guides urgent needs, coordinated support, appointments and chased progression in the same way that it does for any other support situation. No longer is there a need to ask the Service Desk to see if one of the situations can be arranged, which very often fails in standard practice. Instead, AP ensures each situation is handled, and reliably so, with there being no advantage to be found in phoning it in.

Benefits for Service Recipients

A well designed AP portal underpinned by an equally effective Service Catalogue becomes the most sensible channel to use for practically all support situations. Timeliness and responsiveness is assured, with less time and effort spent, making support far easier to receive.

Tickets are assigned directly to the correct resolver team, so...

There is less likelihood of an attempted fix being unsuccessful, or it taking too long.

No time is spent waiting in a queue to speak to someone.

Less time is spent on the phone while a team member carries out initial checks.

A high proportion of needs can be met in the background with no requester involvement.

Industry benchmark data shows that a portal is already the most popular channel for Service Requests, i.e., for non-urgent needs.

With Portal Purposing for urgent needs, coordinated support, appointments, and chased tickets, recipients can be expected to happily avoid the Call Centre altogether.

Benefits for IT Organisations

The imperative to become a Digital Channel Service Desk is doubled because there are more benefits for IT organisations in making the transition than there are for service recipients.

A first is that all support needs are prioritised as they should be. Recipients no longer "jump the queue" by phoning-in with non-urgent needs that detriment a team's ability to service genuinely urgent needs. Always the right actvity at the right time through AP means that there is no longer a reason to do so.

In standard practice, the extent of call centres servicing non-urgent needs should not be underestimated. Typically, only a very small percentage of phone calls - well under ten percent - are for support that needs to be provided straight away, with the majority being information requests that should be provisioned through a portal or Virtual Agent anyway.

A second key advantage is that with accurate mapping to the correct resolver team ensured through the Service Catalogue redesign, ticket reassignment is minimised. Each reassignment typically adds hours of delay, making its avoidance more an advantage for service recipients than for the service provider.

The biggest benefit though is that for the front-line Service Desk, moving away from being on the phone all day long is great for IT employee experience.

Most Service Desk professionals - most people - prefer not to be in a role where the phone is ringing all day long. Apart from the continuous pressure, on a Call Centre there is no space to plan how tasks are to be addressed, no ease of collaboration and teamwork, and when a ticket is not competed during a phone call, there is limited capacity to follow-through to completion in a timely way.

By marginalising the Call Centre through Portal Purposing, the benefits enjoyed by second-line support are brought to a Service Desk's other half - first line. By removing Call Centre reliance, the Service Desk is no longer split is half.

Being a single unified team means the environment is right for everyone to acquire the full complement of Service Desk knowledge and skills, which is ideal for efficient workload management, collective teamwork, ease of cover during periods of leave, and for career progression.

Perhaps most importantly, though, no longer being tied to phone lines means more space for high value work like improving the knowledge base, workflows and AI.

All of these benefits positively impact service delivery, so benefit service recipients too.

AP with Portal Purposing can be shared out to other enterprise service divisions, and best of all, to external Customer Services, for maximum value realisation.

How is Portal Purposing for Urgent needs set up?

If including Portal Purposing for urgent needs, and if AI is to be successful, the Service Catalogue's classifications must leave no confusion as to which to choose when raising a ticket. Simplification is key.

The benefits are big. In addition to reliable direct ticket assignment, an effective catalogue produces support service information that is also highly accurate and therefore actionable for decision-making.

For AP, the key gain is that classifications deemed to be urgent are mapped to an "Urgent" ticket status that has a very short lead time (called a Progression Threshold in AP), so urgent needs appear ahead of all others in the order for progression.

Furthermore, because the AP way of working maintains consistently appropriate prioritisation to ensure timeliness for all tickets in all situations, and so reliability is the new service experience, service recipients have no reason to "jump the queue" by raising support as urgent when it is not. It means that on the service portal, recipients can be provided with the option of identifying their need as being urgent if the Service Catalogue or a Virtual Agent does not automatically do so. Like chased tickets, whether it is indeed to be treated as urgent is then decided by the receiving team, de-escalating in agreement with the recipient whenever appropriate.

As a high priority status, "Urgent" tickets can appear in everyone's ticket list for a team-wide swarmed approach, or if your tool does not support that, urgent needs can be presented team-wide through a "Progression Dashboard", available for any teammate who has the availability and knowledge to pick it up. In this way, critical needs requiring prompt attentiveness are no longer obscured and easily missed, left for just one teammate to identify and pick-up. Everyone in the receiving support team is given clear visibility and is responsible for ensuring the right response.

Ideally, teamwork in covering high priority activity will be recognised, to motivate it happening reliably and as soon as possible. This is the primary purpose of Flow Management's Contribution Recognition capability.

For Service Customers, what are the Call Centre disadvantages?

There is often a wait to be put through to someone, sometimes for too long.

If the need is urgent, a long wait results in particular frustration, or service failure if the call is abandoned.

Less experienced team-members are sometimes unable to meet a support need efficiently or at all.

The caller must wait if documentation must be found / read, or if collaboration is required.

Only first-line support is available - needs are often for another team.

When the need is for another team, a ticket assignment mistake causes substantial delay.

When urgent and for another team, the urgency might not be quickly recognised by the receiving team.

What disadvantages affect the Service Provider?

To minimise long phone call wait times, work shifts with continuous minimum cover must be closely managed.

IT employee experience: Generally, people do not like being on the phone all day long, and:

1. Capacity for collaboration is limited - a "first-time fix" requires answers from co-workers to be immediate.

2. There is no preparation time - support is "on the spot", which can be stressful.

Compromised prioritisation: "Jumping the queue" with non-urgent needs is allowed.

Servicing non-urgent needs as if they are urgent harms ability to reliably respond when truly urgent needs come in.

If first-line staff are not allowed to maintain ticket ownership due to difficulty finding time to progress ageing tickets, the job satisfaction of following through to completion is lost.

Alternatively, if first-line staff are allowed to maintain ticket ownership, progression is unreliable and untimely.

At quiet times - commonly later in the day - staff time is badly utilised in doing little else than waiting for a call.

Summary

Even without a team-wide swarmed approach, prioritisation of activity plus precise expectations in the five situations covered by Portal Purposing, is far more effective than standard practice in which the situations often are not handled well, or at all.

Why not subscribe to the Service System blog written for HDI SupportWorld, to receive a key insight about IT support's struggles weekly...