Manage your staff expectations like you’d manage your clients’ to provide great service…

I’m getting a bit frustrated with my local council at the moment. I have an issue to take up and despite email requests to numerous departments, I’ve not had one reply in the last three weeks. End result? I’ve lost confidence in them. And I feel frustrated.

Running a busy IT service desk also brings its customer service challenges. Myriad requests, queries, questions and even the 'occasional' moan are received day in day out. The same is probably true for finance, HR and marketing departments (to an extent).

Ensuring messages and emails are returned promptly, prioritising them and then dealing with the issues takes time. But there are a few simple measures you can take to manage expectations and still provide a great responsive service.

Manage communication channels

You may want to consider setting up an email address for low-priority requests or queries. It can take time before users become comfortable with this - a common perception is that emailed requests disappear into a black hole. We countered this by ensuring that any email requests were responded to by phone or email, without fail, within a reasonable timescale.

Our centralised service desk telephone number has been set aside for urgent requests only. We also encourage staff not to email the IT team members directly about general IT issues, advising them that they will get a more immediate response if they use the central communication channels.

Sometimes the inevitable occurs and technology fails. In these instances we use our SharePoint portal (intranet) to provide staff with regular updates. This cuts down on incoming queries, allowing us to focus on the task in hand.

Honesty is the best policy

It’s tempting to be very optimistic about when you can deal with an issue or act on a request. But, even though it may not be met with delight, being honest about delivery times is important if you want to remain credible. On the other hand, promising something in three weeks you know you can deliver in two isn’t the best policy either. Be as honest and precise as you can.

Prepare and Provide Self Help Information

We used some free SharePoint application templates to set up a knowledge base specifically for use by IT personnel.

We’ve recently branched out and produced a similar knowledge base for our users. We can quickly and efficiently provide links to articles in the knowledge base. This requires a careful approach, because sometimes people just want someone to talk them through an issue and not be directed to a web page!

These are just a few suggestions on how we manage our customer service. I like to think we have a good rapport with our users and all methods have to run alongside principles of empathy, professionalism and good technical knowledge.

As for my battle with the council, I’ll be lodging a complaint. Now that’s sure to have them quaking in their boots…

What do you think of Nigel's approach to helpdesk? Does your firm work this well? Or would you do it differently? Let us know in the comments below.