DWS Service Desk Rescue Series: Sample IT Operational Issues - Details

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In this blog, we will take some of those IT issues and break them down in further detail to obtain a better understanding. Using this approach, you can then apply this to any issue you encountered.

Let us take a look at the first issue, which is SLA Hold. 

Let us first begin by understanding what is SLA Hold in the context of IT support.

Every IT ticket has a service level agreement [SLA] assigned to it.

For example, an IT ticket may have a resolution time of four hours. This means from the moment the ticket is opened, it should be resolved within four hours.

There is a field in the IT ticket called incident state, which specifies what state the ticket is in. For example, the ticket can be in an open state, an assigned state, a cancelled state, resolved, closed, and an SLA hold state.

The difference between SLA. hold and the other states are that when the ticket is placed on hold, the clock measuring the time difference between when the ticket was opened and when it will be resolved, gets put on hold.

This means if the total time between open and resolved, let’s say is 10 hours. However, the ticket was on S.L.A. hold for six hours, which means the active time was four hours and the S.L.A. target was achieved.

You can see where this will be a problem. From a customer's perspective, it took 10 hours, however from a reporting perspective, the IT team is saying it took only four hours.

So, in some companies, we find that the IT teams sometimes abuse the use of SLA hold to make their numbers. This can result in client escalations and put the contract at risk as a client can say there’s abuse taking place.

So, what are some of the things that you can do to ensure an SLA hold is not being abused? You can strengthen management, quality management, reporting and measurements, analytics and optimization, continual service improvement, and overall service level management, just to name a few things.

Let us explore knowledge management issues. 

Every organization should have a tool where people can post articles, documents, and processes and procedures on how to do the work.

This tool should be maintained, available to everyone, and the content should be accurate and current. When this doesn't happen, you can end up with issues.

For example, inaccurate knowledge base information can lead to longer times to resolve client issues and cause client escalations.

If the knowledge base articles are not shared with other IT teams or even the customers, IT operations will not be able to take advantage of IT teams or clients helping themselves.

A few things that can be done to address these issues are completely overhauling the knowledge management process and ensuring it is explicitly clear.

Training can also be provided to all potential users of the knowledge tool to ensure they are aware of the tool and know how to use it.

There should be an active communication strategy on the tool's effectiveness and when new articles are published.

Let us now take a look at another key issue that IT operations usually face - Re-Open and Repeat Callers. 

This is the issue with re-open and repeat callers. This issue usually arises when IT support teams prematurely close a ticket because they have targets that they have to hit. Targets such as how much time they spend on the phone or how many tickets they should be working on per day.

This means the more tickets they process the least amount of time, the better their numbers look.

So, when the IT support teams do close the tickets prematurely, this causes a customer to call back multiple times for the same issue,—resulting in a poor client experience.

This happens in teams where there is a blind focus on numbers and not on quality.

The Way to address this is to implement a robust quality management system, incident management system, knowledge management system, reporting and measurements, analytics and optimization, and continual service improvement.

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Let's start by looking at email issues. 

This is usually one of the top three issues in any company. The types of email issues usually fall into several groups.

One group is how-to questions. A second group is more infrastructure-related.

How-to questions are relatively straightforward, and the resolution is largely dependent on the skill of the IT support analyst and the knowledge base.

Now, if you look at the infrastructure-related issues, this is largely dependent on the servers, storage, network, and many other areas that can have an impact.

Organizations that continue to have email issues are organizations that don’t have an effective knowledge base, do not have an effective training program, have not hired skilled workers, do not conduct skill gap analysis, etc.…

all these things can lead to continued issues with emails where users are unable to send or receive emails, resulting in an impact on the business and customer satisfaction.

Actions that can be taken to minimize these are to strengthen the knowledge management system, improve self-service, develop reports and measurements to track and trend the email issues, use the analytics and optimization system to extract insights as to what continues to cause these issues, and put all the findings in the continual service improvement process to fix the issues.

Let's take a look at the next issue. Password reset issues. The approach to password issues is the same as the approach to email issues. 

Password issues represent the top three issues that any organization faces anywhere in the world. They typically account for approximately 30% of all contacts to IT support.

Continued issues with passwords typically arise when the organization does not have a strong cyber security policy, or they have not communicated the policy to the end-users.

This results in calls to the service desk asking to reset passwords. This can lead to user downtime and productivity impact.

Organizations can get password issues under control by leveraging self-service tools and automation to drive fewer calls to the helpdesk. They can better define their business controls process, better use reporting and measurements, analytics and optimization, and continual service improvement.

Let's take a look at issues with Ticket Backlogs. This is probably one of the most significant sources of complaints other than Reopen or Repeat Callers. 

Ticket backlogs are tickets where IT support has informed the client, they need additional time to resolve the issue. And then they forget about the ticket, leaving the customer with prolonged downtimes.

When IT teams do not have enough staff of skilled staff, it can lead to tickets building up in the queue and no one picking them up to work on them.

As stated earlier, this can result in prolonged downtimes, a business impact, and poor client satisfaction.

To avoid issues with ticket backlogs, IT support teams should look at their growth management process, skills/training management process, resource management process, knowledge management process, queue management process and the group of three processes which are reporting and measurements, analytics and optimization, and continual service improvement.

Let us take a look at the last item on the slide, issues with escalations. 

Escalations are additional calls and complaints to IT support team about the poor service the customers feel they are receiving.

This can be caused by a lack of queue management, unmanaged ageing backlogs, staffing problems, skills and capability issues, and a lack of timely updates to tickets.

This can lead to prolonged Times on the phone, waiting for someone to answer, clients complaining about the lack of updates, not knowing what is going on, and clients unable to perform work because they’re still waiting to have their issues fixed.

To address these issues, IT support teams should implement an issues and escalation management system, Q management system, incident management system, and a group of three processes: reporting and measurements, analytics and optimization, and continual service improvement.