A Day in the Life of Service Desk

Who are we?

The Service Desk at AJ Bell is the first point of contact for all staff when they have any IT related issues or queries. Staff submit queries via our ticket system, phone call or walk up. We are a very busy department, but always strive to provide excellent customer service to colleagues who need our help. At present there are 18 members of staff in the team with a broad range of skills and experience.

The ‘face’ of Service Desk has changed a lot over the last year, so we thought it was a good time to say hello and help give an insight into our daily life! Although known as ‘Service Desk’, there are three parts to the team: 1) Front Office – the happy, smiley faces and voices colleagues see when they either walk up to the desk or give us a call; 2) Back Office – the team who will investigate further into some of the more complex issues, and also build company laptops/mobiles etc; and 3) Second Line – who take care of big complex projects and tasks.

If there’s one consistency in our day… it’s caffeine! The first requirement for any morning is a strong cup of coffee or tea, but that’s where the day-to-day similarities pretty much end as, on Service Desk, you never have the same day twice. The role of Service Desk Analyst is challenging but rewarding – you have to know all the systems, be very customer service focused and always thrive to be as helpful as you can.

The day will usually start off with checks and tickets from overnight but this has reduced in numbers given our focus to look at themes of user tickets and to implement innovative solutions for our users to mitigate an issue or allowing self service.When the phones aren’t ringing, we will look at the current open tickets and try to plan our days accordingly – however plans don’t always work! After the morning rush, this is where we will start dealing with the more complex tickets and making calls to staff about issues.

Prepare for the unexpected

Unfortunately, our day doesn’t always go like this. Sometimes we will experience Major Incidents (or MIs for short).

The biggest indication that something may have broken is when we look at our KPI screen and see more calls waiting than we have staff on hand. On average our speed to answer calls into the team for the past 6 months has been ~10 seconds, so if the wait is longer than that then there may be an issue with one of the crucial company systems.

During the rare times of MIs, we provide communication to staff via floor walks, Teams chats, email comms, and messages on our intranet. We also encourage managers and team leaders to cascade the info among their teams; this is to reduce volume of call traffic coming through to the Service Desk.  

Whilst this is all going on, remember those happy faces I mentioned earlier? Well, staff in the office will see them around each floor checking in with each team to see if there’s any immediate support we can provide or to give live updates in person, as it’s nice to see the human behind the computer! Not only will we do it during the MI, but once it’s resolved, we’ll pop back round just to see if there are any follow up issues.

But wait, there’s more?

Yes! On top of everything mentioned, we still have more to do. There are lots of new faces in Service Desk recently, this is due to a combination of the team growing and people progressing to different areas of technology services within the company. We actively encourage mobility and even had people from the business join technology services. Recently, part of my role has been to train up our new starters.

Whilst we always strive to solve tickets at the point of earliest opportunity, there can be multiple factors which may delay the resolution. Therefore, part of my day will involve looking at the oldest tickets the team have open and providing support directly to the person who has raised the ticket, or the Service Desk analyst who is working on this. Over the past six months we have reduced the backlog of aged tickets by 50%. This was achieved by putting a greater focus on the oldest tickets and working with our colleagues in the Tech Services wider team.

As a team, we’re always looking for ways to improve, so I also work closely with my Team Leader to help implement improvements to Service Desk. So, we encourage staff to let us know of anything they may think of to help us help them.

As you can see, we have a lot going on being the scenes, so what is one thing that helps motivate everyone? Food! We always have a constant supply of snacks, chocolate, and biscuits… so, to get in our good books… well I don’t need to say more!