ITSM Professional Explained : Inspired by experiences of Service Desk Owners (a hypothetical use case)….

[abhaykulkarni]

"Thank you for all the hard work in running the service desk so well", said the CIO, as he opened the monthly meeting with various service desk owners in his company.

A little brief on the company. This is a big retail giant, with stores all over the United States and beyond. They have nearly perfected (only because as the saying goes "no one is absolutely perfect") the art of retailing. They seem to have the right product, pricing and distribution strategy. Sales has been soaring, and so has been the cost of retailing. The company has seen strong customer loyalty & hence repeat purchases. In an effort to reduce the cost of retailing, the company wants to use its retail stores for attracting new customers. The marketing team has been busy creating campaigns for loyal customers, encouraging them to use the online channel. This makes it imperative that the service desk focuses its efforts on their data center and other infrastructure that supports online shopping.
"We have a directive from our corporate folks. Put all our energies towards ensuring that our customers' online experience is not disrupted."

Key metrics & its trickle down effect: An important part of defining your service desk's operational strategy is to align the same with your company's key objectives & related goals. In the above example, the company has decided on making the online experience easy and seamless for returning customers. The IT Service desk has to align itself and its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) with this strategy. Trying to chase too many KPIs at the same time might distract the service desk from critical corporate objectives. As for our retail giant, one of the key metric tracked could be 'mean time to resolve' for any 'online shopping related infrastructure issue'.

"But how do we know what goal to target?" was the immediate question from a service desk owner followed by, "We take 5 days on an average to resolve any issue. Should we reduce that to half for 'online infrastructure'? By the way, we do define 'online infrastructure' as one of our categories."

Benchmarks & Goal setting: As you can see in the above example, the service desk owner has no means to base her decision on. Should she target a MTTR of 3 days or 2 days? Reducing MTTR by 25% or 50% would have different ramifications on cost, process and culture. 'ServiceNow Benchmark' provides you with insights into key KPIs for your company, as well as aggregated and anonymized information from other ServiceNow customers. Furthermore, these insights can be sliced in various ways (Geo, Industry, etc.). You can see how your KPI has trended, as also the percentile ranking you hold for that KPI among ServiceNow customers. This information should help you set reasonable and achievable goals.

"Now that we have a goal - 2 days instead of 4," the service desk owner mused, "This should reduce the load on fallback mechanisms; but where do I begin? How do I analyze my service desk?"

Performance Analytics: Analysis should be available when needed. In many companies, a lot of time is spent in defining data structures in a separate warehouse, defining common data models, data movement & report definitions. This is generally done by a separate team that needs to learn your service desk metadata, and then translate the same into data warehouse definitions. Data Warehousing has its own value. But for quick time to information, you need a system that integrates well out of the box with ServiceNow; and where data collection and report generation is not an effort that needs a Project Management Office. 'Performance Analytics', part of the ServiceNow Pro package, provides this functionality. It comes with pre seeded metrics out of the box, that can be used from day one of implementation.

"Do we need services of our data warehousing team?", asked the CIO trying to read the service desk owner's mind. "No, not at all. In fact, I have the Performance Analytics (PA) report here. Let's get insights on areas for improvement specific to our service desks," the service desk owner knew that her CIO was impressed. After some analyzing of the service desk operations and some deliberations, it was clear. There were two problems that needed attention. Let's start with the first one. If the service desk staff was to pay attention to incidents from the 'online infrastructure', they need to take some 'load of other common incidents away'. PA reports showed steady incident volumes across categories by week. Something needs to be done to reduce the overall incident volumes.

Virtual Agent: Around 10 - 20 % of the incident volume can be attributed to standard issues like 'password reset', or "can you check the status of my incident", or "I just called to update comments on my incident". ServiceNow packages such scenarios in its 'Virtual Agent' (chat bot) offering (also available in the ITSM pro package). More can be added easily by the customer. The Virtual Agent has been designed to work without NLP or ML if required, thereby saving a lot of implementation time. NLP can be easily added, if needed. Also being a part of the ServiceNow platform, the virtual agent takes full advantage of platform features: business rules, warm agent hand offs, notifications, search, knowledge base, action framework and machine learning, to name a few.

"That should be fairly easy," reported the service desk owner to the CIO, " we can go live with the ServiceNow's Virtual Agent in a matter of weeks". "Exciting times!," praised the CIO, "but you said you had one more problem to solve?" "Ah yes," the service desk said perceptively, "PA helped us discover that our average reassignment count is on the higher side. We need to ensure that our tickets are assigned correctly the first time. Also, given the corporate direction of top level support for 'online infrastructure' category, how can we make sure that we don’t miss those incidents? we need to make sure that any incident with the slightest chance of being in the 'online infrastructure' category be immediately identified and routed appropriately."

Agent Intelligence: The modern service desk is all about service experience and operational efficiencies. Operational efficiencies demand that only value adding activities be performed by resources, to the extent possible. A requestor's 'valuable' use is in logging the ticket with adequate and meaningful description. A fulfiller's 'valuable' use is in resolving incidents. Triaging and re assigning categories or assignment group are additional 'non value adding' and stressful activities, given the increasing number of categories or assignment groups. Also, a lot of service desks experience more than 50% yearly churn in their service agents - a huge loss in organizational learning of how to categorize and / or route incidents. ServiceNow's 'Agent intelligence' (part of the ITSM Pro package) is aimed at taking this stress away. It uses machine learning to learn from past incidents, and auto select the correct category, assignment group, or any other drop down column that it can be trained to do. Implementing it is as easy as answering three questions. The implementation is quick and easy, and needs only the knowledge of your business - and not data science. Furthermore, it can be tuned to pay more attention to specific values like 'online infrastructure' categories in our example.

"Two quick wins", reported the Service desk manager at the next monthly meeting. She had reasons to be proud of. She has implemented Virtual Agent and Agent Intelligence in a month. Both complement each other, but do not necessarily have a dependency. "Fantastic news!," those words of praise were well deserved. After all, traditionally AI and Virtual Agent implementations have never been so easy. These were real quick wins for our service desk owners. "We do have a new challenge. The marketing team decided to conduct a flash sale next week for our online shoppers. We need to modify our virtual agent conversations to sense ' Flash Sale' related requests immediately, use agent intelligence to route the same to the correct assignment group, and then have a warm hand off to live agents. How can we make sure to not let these flash sale related infrastructure tickets fall through the crack?"

The power of ServiceNow Platform: Agent Intelligence and Virtual Agents are ServiceNow platform features. They are designed for quick implementation, and to use all capabilities of the platform. Modifying conversations, using agent intelligence with Virtual Agent for field prediction, sending notifications, warm hand off with live agents and many other such integrations/ implementations are quick and easy given the power of single unified ServiceNow platform.

The quarterly service desk review was due. ServiceNow reports in PA showed that both Virtual Agent and Agent Intelligence were working well with no drift in efficiency. The CIO was proud of his team for implementing these products in a few weeks, and ensuring that both the online infrastructure, and campaigns such as 'Flash Sale' were efficiently managed. Having said that, he knew that there was no way on earth that this excellent team would be complacent of their work. He patiently waited for the next suggestion which came quickly from the service desk owner. "You know, we have a great system in place to learn from data and help make decisions," she said. The CIO knew that the 'but' was coming. She continued "But I would like to improve the data we collect and let the agent intelligence system learn from better data. I want to put in a phased process for data governance, and measure its efficacy using KPIs over each phase and period of time."

Continual Improvement Management (CIM): Designed on principles of Total Quality Management, CIM (also a part of ITSM Pro package) guides an improvement initiative through its planning and implementation cycle. It helps you include measures of success in a phased manner, and unlike standard projects, is circular in nature. This means that one continual improvement initiative at its completion can lead to the next initiative, thus fostering a continuous learning and improvement culture.

The journey for continuous performance analysis, service excellence and operational efficiency continues. ITSM Pro package is your vehicle.