The COVID-19 pandemic has brought added pressure to the IT service desks as they juggle the complexities of a newly remote workforce and strive to do more with less. In these crossroads, it helps when your IT service desk is right-sized.
This is according to Vikrant R Rao, segment marketing specialist at Freshworks, who was speaking ahead of a Freshworks webinar on service desk management this week.
“The biggest challenge faced by organisations has been continuing IT support and maintaining employee experience as it was before the pandemic,” he says.
“With entire workforces being forced to go remote, the transition was quite difficult for many organisations. Even though many offices are slowly opening up again, service desks have remained instrumental in providing IT support to employees.
"The other major task for IT leaders is to ensure that costs don’t go up while remote work extends and while the IT team is expected to do more with less. If your service desk is not right-sized, IT leaders have a difficult time justifying their IT spends and ROI of the service desk. This also puts a great deal of stress on agents and affects agent productivity.”
He notes that at the same time, the pandemic has suddenly forced companies to fast track their digital initiatives and be more proactive. “With the sudden shift to remote work, traditional organisational structures had a difficult time where IT was not at the centre of business but more of a back-end and reactive function.”
Rao warns that there are risks to the organisation should IT service buckle under this pressure: “Workplace technologies have a big impact on employee engagement. Companies are at the risk of losing their best performing employees. A recent HBR Analytic Services Survey indicated that 77% say good employees will look for a new employer if their current job does not provide the tools, technology, or information they need to do their job well. Organisations could also see a drop in employee productivity, and hence customer relationships failing. They are also at the risk of losing customers due to lack of support from the organisation,” he says.
Freshworks, in partnership with ITWeb, is hosting a webinar this week to outline key challenges currently facing service desks, and how organisations should evaluate ‘right sized’ ITSM solutions to support them.
For more information and to register for this event, go to https://itweb.co.za/webinar/freshworks-right-sized-service-management-for-modern-organisations/
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