Running an Efficient Service Desk

Running an Efficient Service Deskby René Verhagen and Manfred van der Sluijs

Agenda

Introduction NetServe Our Service Desk How we use Autotask Smart features (at least we think they are smart..) Recap Question and Answer

NetServe BV Introduction

RenéCEO - NetServe

Founder

Certified Consulting Partner

ManfredManager Operations - NetServe

AutoTask Administrator

Certified Consulting Partner

About NetServe

NetServe BV | The Netherlands | Rotterdam Area Founded in 1997, MSP since 2008 Services-only Annual turnover EUR 1M MSP contracts cover 85% of running costs Autotask customer since July 2009 N-Able customer since July 2010

Our Service Desk

General Service Desk• Primary Service Desk• Contract customers• Break-Fix customers

Co-managed Service Desk• NetServe acts as the primary responsible Service Desk• Customer uses Taskfire

Co-Managed Service Desk• Customer acts as the primary responsible Service Desk• Customer uses Taskfire

Our Services Desk (cont’d)

Two dedicated technical engineers

All engineers are ITIL foundation V2 / V3 certified

NetServe Service Desk Processes are ITIL based: * Incident Management* Change Management* Release Management* Configuration Management

ITIL does not dictate Service Desk processes, but offers best practices.

Service Desk, according to ITIL

“The Service Desk acts as the central point of contact between service providers and users on a day to day basis.”

“It is also a focal point for reporting incidents and for service requests.”

“It can also provide an interface, for other service management activities. (such as problem, configuration,release and continuity management)”

source: www.itil.org.uk

http://www.itil.org.uk/

Autotask helping us getting organized

Structure Automated workflows

Metrics Reporting

Meeting our SLA’s

Typical Reactive Ticket Workflow

Customer reports an issue

Registration

Service Desk Queue

Dispatching by planning

Assigned to engineer/

Assigned Queue

Ticket being worked on by

engineer

Ticket Resolved

Customer informed

Ticket Completion

Typical Proactive Ticket Workflow

RMM Detects an issue

Integration with Autotask results

in a ticket

Monitoring Alert Queue

Picked up by Remote administration

engineer

Corrective Actions

Issue Resolved

Next day check

Issue Resolved? YES

Ticket Completion

Functionality that helps us run our Service Desk

Email to ticket parser from

Workflow Rules to notify and move tickets through the process

Recurring Tickets

Functionality that helps us run our Service Desk

Internal & External Reporting We use a combination Live Reports and Pivot Tables

(Excel) Extensive use of scheduled reports Integration with N-Able for:

- Monitoring Alerts- Keeping our CMDB up to date (Discovery Wizard)

Configuration Management is extremely important to us. Without solid information fromit we would be blind!

Examples of our internal reporting

Examples of our reporting

Smart Features that improve efficiency

Reports for Company Owners to prepare for any kind of customer facing action.

It gives them a brief overview of all performed actions for that particular customer

Details can be revealed by clicking on the ticket title


Email notifications when worked hours exceed set threshold.

Notification (email) when worked hours > 2

We contact the customer upon notification to discuss the situation and the expected time needed to solve the issue

This prevents discussions with the customer at the time of invoicing


Daily scheduled report for tickets with status “waiting customer” and “waiting vendor” and last activity > x days.

Customers and vendors in this list will be reminded to prevent delay in the resolution of the issue.


Currently we use a third party dashboard tool (developed by a dutch Autotask customer)

It gives us an overview of daily metrics like amount of

received tickets, amount of closed tickets, average duration, etc.

Autotask recently developed their own dashboard service. (for more information contact your Autotask rep)


Smart filters on our email-to ticket gateway.Preventing tickets

being created from out-of-the-office

replies

Attaching the original e-mail incl.

headers to the ticket

Linking notes forwarded by our

staff to the customer


We make extensive use of the Outlook add-in to create

Tickets from emails Ticket notes from emails Project notes from emails


We have setup an audible alarm in our Service Desk to get the immediate attention of the engineers in certain events.

Improvements that we are working on

Even in the system of a CCP is room for improvement

A few of the improvements we are working on: Developing a smarter way to deal with the “note added”

status Implementing “ticket created notification” and survey upon

completing tickets Invoicing from Autotask using Invoice Templates

(October Release)

Running an Efficient Service Desk

Technology

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