Service Management for Dummies®

Chapter 12. Service Support and the Service Desk

In This Chapter

• Seeing what a service desk does

• Understanding event management

• Measuring service desk performance

One of the fundamental truths of service management is that when you do it well, the service management team is like the wizard behind the curtain in the Land of Oz. If your e-mail never goes down and your technical equipment never fails, you don't go looking behind the curtain to understand what went wrong.

The reality is that services do fail and errors do occur − and when they do, customers (or service users) need to have their questions answered and problems resolved. Whatever a problem is, it must be reported, diagnosed, evaluated, and fixed quickly.

This chapter defines the service desk, describes its parts, and explains its activity.

Watching the Service Desk in Action . . . or Inaction

For many businesses, the service desk is the first port of call in customer interactions. Imagine the lost productivity and revenue, and the all-around chaos, that would occur if companies didn't have effective systems to manage IT service delivery and deal with problems effectively when they arose.

Suppose that you manage a retail store for Poor Service Corp. You have 10 point-of-sale (POS) systems, 15 phones on voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), 5 customer kiosks, and several back-office PCs and servers. That's a lot of technology that needs to be monitored and managed. Unfortunately, the service desk at Poor Service Corp. is inconsistent ...