Call Centre disadvantages - the Digital Channel Service Desk imperative

The Principle

Flow Management is one half of the Focus Framework. The other sets out 20 good practice principles for IT Support - criteria for support to be done well upon which Flow Management capabilities are based.

Activity Prioritisation (AP) is Flow Management's base capability. It is surrounded by several principles including that all urgent support needs must be identified and handled quickly enough, even if for only one person unable to do something essential. Of course, this outcome is an operational necessity.

The Universal Problem

Ordinarily, an IT organisation's service system for channeling and prioritising support does not provide for the outcome, even when urgent assistance is 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 is intended for servicing urgent needs, reliability falls well short, so the principle cannot manifest in reality.

The Solution

In that it enables the urgent needs principle to be met, and removes all 16 Call Centre disadvantages, Portal Purposing for urgent needs is one of three primary aspects of Flow Management.

Through Portal Purposing, the majority of urgent support needs are consistently and automatically identified, for prompt address through AP.

Flow Management's basic form of AP, called "Progression Point Prioritisation", which can be implemented very easily in any service tool through configuration alone, is equally suited.

Then, two complementary Portal Purposing capabilities altogether remove any need to phone the Service Desk. One is for chasing ticket progress, which will still occasionally be necessary, especially when a service ticket is urgent but isn't automatically identified as such. The other is for arranging support appointments. Both also integrate into Activity Prioritisation, ensuring timeliness for both.

Portal Purposing can be equally advantageous for a Chat channel.

Benefits for Service Recipients

Portal Purposing (with AP) means that a portal becomes the most sensible channel to use for practically all support situations because timeliness and responsiveness is assured, plus less time and effort is spent by the recipient, making support far easier to receive:

Tickets are assigned directly to the right 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.

Ease of receiving support through a portal is a fact and benefit that is already recognised by service recipients. Industry benchmark data shows that a portal is already the most popular channel for Service Requests, i.e., for non-urgent needs.

It means that by forming Portal Purposing for urgent needs, chases, and appointments, most recipients can be expected to happily avoid the Call Centre altogether, removing all of its disadvantages.

The imperative to remove Call Centre reliance is doubled because there are more benefits for IT organisations in making the transition than there are for service recipients...

Benefits for IT Organisations

A first advantage of becoming a predominantly Digital Channel Service Desk is that all support needs are prioritised properly. Customers can no longer "jump the queue" by phoning-in with non-urgent needs.

The extent of a Call Centre servicing non-urgent needs should not be underestimated. Typically, only a very small percentage of phone calls - well under ten percent - are for information requests and other urgent support needs.

A second key advantage is that because Portal Purposing relies on an optimal Service Catalogue design, ticket assignment mistakes become rare, minimising how often tickets need to be reassigned (bounced). This is also a key advantage for requesters, minimising lost work time.

The biggest benefit though is that moving away from being on the phone all day long is great for IT employee experience.

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

By marginalising the Call Centre, 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 everyone's career progression.

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

Then, the "digital transformation" can be shared out to other enterprise service divisions, and best of all, to external Customer Services, for maximum value realisation.

How is it set up?

The transition necessitates an optimal Service Catalogue as its foundation. Well-designed service classifications must leave no confusion as to which to choose when raising a ticket.

The benefits are big. In addition to reliable direct ticket assignment, a quality 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" status that has a very short "progression threshold", so these critical tickets appear ahead of all others in the order for progression.

For reliability, urgent tickets can appear in everyone's ticket list for a team-wide swarmed approach, and in advanced AP or "Perfect Prioritisation", can be covered by working from a "Progression Dashboard".

The importance of promptly covering urgent tickets (before progression thresholds breach) makes recognition of it a key performance metric, through the Focus Framework's Team Performance Management practice - one aspect of advanced service level reporting that utilises Flow Metrics.

So for service customers, what are the disadvantages of using a support Call Centre?

There is often a wait to be connected, 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 efficiently meet a support need, 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, an assignment mistake causes substantial delays.
When urgent and for another team, the urgency might not be quickly recognised by the receiving team.

What are the disadvantages for a service provider?

To minimise call queue wait-times, work shifts with continuous minimum cover must be closely managed.
IT employee experience: Generally speaking, people do not like being on the phone all day long.
Compromised prioritisation: "Jumping the queue" with non-urgent needs is allowed.
Servicing non-urgent needs as if they are urgent harms quick response ability for truly urgent needs.
Capacity for collaboration is limited - a "first-time fix" requires answers from co-workers to be immediate.
There is no preparation time - support is "on the spot", which can be stressful.
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 untimely.
At quiet times, staff time is badly utilised in doing little else than waiting for a call.

Some requesters will still prefer to pick up the phone though. So, the question might be asked:

Is the preference of a few good enough reason to keep the Call Centre openly available?

Or, will a service management principle of adopting modern digital ways take precedence?

Thorough organisational change management should be utilised to find the answer, or to softly transition the change.

In the view of Opimise, a softly transitioned change should be the chosen strategy. After all, even though the service experience of external customers is critical for the success of any business, it is quite usual for line-of-business products and services to be supported soley through a portal form, online Chat or call-back these days, so why should IT support be very different?

Whatever the answer, a portal-first approach is highly advantageous, to whatever extent it might be.

It, and everything about Flow Management, is Digital Transformation for Teams.

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