Having started my career on the service desk, I know exactly what life is like answering the phone day in, day out. People are generally not calling you because they are having an awesome day. They have questions and issues and have no patience for anything except immediate resolution. Because of that, the service desk is constantly pressured to close tickets faster, while new technologies are thrown at them, in many cases with little time for training.
For many organizations, the difficult working situation on the service desk leads to low morale, high stress, and extreme boredom as the team deals with highly repetitive questions and issues. It is therefore no surprise that the average attrition rate on the service desk is 41%. That’s a huge issue, especially when you consider that it takes around 250 hours to fully train an agent on service desk technologies.
A properly running service desk that delivers a great employee experience is crucial to every organization, since the service desk is the front face of IT and has a huge impact on employee satisfaction and productivity. Despite all the hard work that IT does daily, when IT satisfaction survey results come out, they can be tarnished by a single bad service desk experience.
I recently had the pleasure to host a webinar with Dennis Vasquez, manager of IT at Dexcom. Dennis is a visionary when it comes to running a service desk. He understands the importance of finding opportunities to improve the overall experience for their service agents, which in turn ensures a great experience for his employees.
One of challenges that Dexcom faces on their service desk is that the company has been growing at over 30% for the past few years – hiring hundreds of people a month. A couple of years ago, Dennis realized he needed to add another 20 people on the service desk to handle the incredible growth of the company – but that is easier said than done and would not scale long term. Adding 20 more qualified people while dealing with backfilling attrition, not to mention finding space for them to work, was not a trivial problem to solve. In addition, global expansion required them to shift to a 24/7 support model, further adding pressure on the team.
How did they solve their issue? A combination of technology and rethinking the roles of service desk agents to maximize the use of the technology. Espressive Barista was deployed to automate the resolution of employee issues and requests. As the company has continued to grow, Dennis has been able to not only keep his service desk size the same, but he has provided his agents an opportunity to up level their skills to become “automaters” versus constantly answering the same questions over and over. As Dennis explains in the webinar, morale in the team has never been better, attrition is at an all-time low, and that means they are delivering the best experience to Dexcom employees.
Who doesn’t want to do that? You can check out what Dennis said here.
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