University Assignment: Managing Quality Customer Service Help Desk

This assignment solution addresses the efficient management of a help desk as a vital component of good customer service and customer relationship management. The solution emphasizes the importance of improving help desk performance through a focus on small, incremental steps rather than drastic overhauls. It discusses two key features of effective help desk management: auditing existing practices and implementing self-service solutions. Auditing involves examining current support processes and identifying best practices, such as leveraging ITIL principles. Self-service solutions are presented as cost-effective ways to provide operative out-of-hours coverage and reduce the workload on first-line help desks. The solution references several academic sources to support its points.

Running head: QUALITY CUSTOMER SERVICE
Manage Quality Customer Service
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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Question 1
Efficient management of a help desk is a vital aspect of good customer service and
customer relationship. Therefore there is a serious need of improving the performance of help
desks and its proper management. It would help managers in acquiring blended internal and
external performance benefits. The key is to take small steps in the direction of service
improvement instead of just starting from the start and investing largely in the dynamic
approach. However, relationships with customers face hurdles when the small steps are taken, as
it makes the organization become overly concentrated on the integration and change instead of
focusing in the ultimate gain - the provision of the best customer relationship and customer
service (Conger, 2015). Two of the most effective features of good help desk management are
discussed below:
1. Auditing the existing practices
Prior to undertaking of any form of improvement activities, there is a need of examining
what is already being done inside the business that are related to providing of support in the
sections of helpdesk, customers and other departments. Typically it can happen that there are
already a number of departments and teams who are undertaking activities similar to this and
there are possibilities that some best practices are already existing in place inside the
organization which can be further advanced and adopted elsewhere (Pankowska, 2012). For
instance, inside a software company’s internal IT support, IT infrastructure library (ITIL)
principles have already been adopted, from which the customer care team can profit directly
from the ITIL method for problem, incident, release and change management in different areas
like tracking product improvement and implementation of those new products in the market to

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the customers (Abid, 2012). Audits of the service level management by means of establishment
of the services offered by the helpdesk and alignment of the IT provision closely with the wider
requirements of the business would also help.
2. Considering self service solutions
Self service solutions are the best solutions if used properly within the organization. They
have the capacity of being extremely profitable. They provide the benefits of offering operative
out-of-hours coverage, which allows any issue the chance of being in focus for being considered
to be dealt with on priority basis the next day. In many cases, the knowledge bases can be even
retrieved by the end user for resolving their own problems. From the perspective of helpdesk
management, these kind of coverage could be proved as being extremely cost-effective,
characteristically taking away one third of the calls to the first line help desk - especially in areas
like status checking and call updates. This has a strong, straight influence on staffing and
recruiting levels, releasing workers in more productive areas inside issue resolution. Having said
this, at a low level, self service is the most efficient solution. It is highly significant that risks like
the end users self administering extremely technical resolutions is avoided (Jäntti, 2013).

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References and Bibliography
Conger, S. (2015). Six sigma and business process management. In Handbook on Business
Process Management 1 (pp. 127-146). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abid, M. A. A. (2012). Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Information
Technology, 1(1).
Rummler, G. A., & Ramias, A. J. (2015). A framework for defining and designing the structure
of work. In Handbook on Business Process Management 1 (pp. 81-104). Springer Berlin
Heidelberg.
Antony, J. (2015). The ten commandments of quality: a performance perspective. International
Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, 64(5), 723-735.
Pankowska, M. (2012, June). User participation in information system development.
In Information Society (i-Society), 2012 International Conference on (pp. 396-401).
IEEE.
Jäntti, M. (2013, July). Exploring self-service support methods in IT service management.
In Service Systems and Service Management (ICSSSM), 2013 10th International
Conference on (pp. 179-184). IEEE.