Service Desk Rescue Series: How to Manage Your Service Desk Staffing Levels

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It can be difficult to maintain staffing levels at your Service Desk when the workload seems to keep increasing. And it's no wonder - with more services being supported and second-level tasks shifted to the first level, there's just more for your team to handle! In this blog post, we'll give you seven tips to help you avoid overloading your Service Desk staff. Read on for helpful advice that will make your life a little easier!

One of the most important things you can do to avoid overloading your Service Desk staff is to make sure you have adequate staffing levels. This may seem like an obvious solution, but it's one that's often overlooked! Make sure you have enough people on your team to handle the workload and don't be afraid.

When it comes to staffing, the best way to avoid overloading your Service Desk is to have an effective resource management system in place. This will ensure that you're always operating at an expected level of efficiency and effectiveness, and utilizing your resources for the attainment of specific goals. At the employee level, an effective resource management process ensures that each staff member is aware of their individual workloads, and can plan and schedule their time accordingly.

Another way to avoid overloading your Service Desk team is to make sure that you have an effective shift planning system in place. This will help to ensure that staffing levels are appropriate for the call volume during each shift, and will help to prevent high wait times and abandonment rates. Matching staffing to call arrival patterns is critical for effective Service Desk operations.

In addition to an effective shift planning system, it is also important to have an accurate staffing model. This will help you to understand how many staff members you need in order to handle the workload. The staffing model should take into account factors such as call volume, average handle time, abandoned calls, and service level agreements. Cost is an important consideration as well.

Once you have an accurate staffing model in place, you can use it to determine the number of staff members needed for each shift. This will help you to ensure that your Service Desk is properly staffed and able to handle the workload.

Another way to avoid overloading your Service Desk staff is to use a ticketing system that allows for workflows, integration of knowledge management systems, intelligent automation and AI. This will help to offload some of the tasks that are currently being done by human beings.
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Lastly, make sure to provide your staff with the proper training and resources. This will enable them to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively. By doing so, you will be able to reduce the number of calls coming into the Service Desk, improve customer satisfaction, improve service levels and reduce operating costs.

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There are a few different ways to improve your staffing levels at the service desk, for that, we will once again refer to our Operational Management Reference Framework.

The Objective of The Process:

The overall goal of the Staffing/Resource Management process is to employ a robust staffing and scheduling methodology that takes into account workload volume analysis and service level requirements in order to ensure that skilled staff are to meet service levels and that staff utilization is at or above expected levels.

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Sample List of Benefits:

• Teams are optimally staffed to handle the workloads
• Work being completed on time and with the expected level of quality
• SLAs being met
• Improved customer satisfaction

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Sample List of Observations:

• Teams not staffed to manage the workloads and requirements of their job.
• Proper analysis of workloads is not being conducted and as a result staffing plans are not aligned to workload profiles.
• Productivity reports are not being generated for each employee.
• Utilization targets not established for the team or each employee.
• Shift towards automation, self-help, self-healing not in place.

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Sample List of Recommendations:

• OM1 - Growth Management - understand the workload profile of your service desk so you can adjust your staffing level accordingly. Take advantage of Level 0 support which can be leveraged resources from other departments.
• OM2 - Financial (Cost) Management - understand the financial constraints the organization is struggling with. If the organization is challenged with Revenue and GP target attainment, cost reduction mandates might be passed down to the service desk.
• OM3 - Skills/Training Management - understand the impact of skills/training on service desk staff utilization and effectiveness. Poorly skilled agents might force you to hire additional staff to meet the service levels.
• OM5 - Quality Management - ensure a framework and set of actions are in place so that can quality of the work that is being performed can be improved. And as a result, utilization can be increased and the requirement for staff can be reduced.
• OM6 - Knowledge Management - ensure employees have adequate resources to understand and resolve the issues promptly, and in a consistent way. This should contribute to improved utilization and fewer staff.
• OM7 - Technology & Tools Management - ensure staff have the necessary tools to efficiently perform their work. This should contribute to higher utilization and reduced requirement for additional staff.
• OM11 - Service Level Management - ensure Service Levels are set correctly so additional staff are not required for aggressive SLAs.
• OM12 - Service Performance Management - Reporting & Measurements - ensure reporting and measurements is in place to track and trend performance and identify areas to improve utilization and reduce staffing requirements.
• OM13 - Service Performance Management - Analytics & Optimization - ensure analytics & optimization is in place to harvest insights from the data and identify areas to improve utilization and reduce staffing requirements.
• OM18 - Queue Management - ensure queue management is in place to efficiently process the workloads. This should contribute to improved utilization rates and reduced requirements for staff.
• OM21 - Staff Utilization - ensure you measure utilization on a regular basis to understand where improvements can be made.
• OM22 - Self-Service Management - Implement a robust self-service program so calls can be redirected to self-support options.
• OM23 - Automation/Self-Heal Management - implement automation/self-heal management to address issues at the source without the involvement of service desk agents.
  

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It can be difficult to maintain staffing levels at your Service Desk when the workload seems to keep increasing. And it's no wonder - with more services being supported and second-level tasks shifted to the first level, there's just more for your team to handle. But don't worry, we're here to help! Contact us today so that we can understand how you can improve your Service Desk Staffing Process and ensure that you have the resources you need to provide excellent customer service. Thanks for reading!