Relevance of IT Enabled Self Service Desk

Have you ever thought of a mechanism, which really motivate employees to express their issues ASAP and get it addressed within a few hours, end to end online?

A pent-up issue of an employee, sometimes, a silly one could even cause serious damage in employee’s relationship with peer/boss.  Trends and technology made rapid changes in organisational culture, the way people work and certainly the employee expectations too.

image courtesy: bottled_void@flickr

Unlike Personnel Administration Department in 80’s or 90’s, we can see a proactive HR Office, today. However grievance handling is a very tricky state of affair and if not handled with utmost care, this could affect the overall rating of HR Office and even derail the business performance.

We can not miss the classic case of such an innovative initiative, successfully executed by an Indian Technology Company, as part of a great HR Initiative “Employee First Customer Second”.

Prof. Gary Hamel, in his blog HCL’s Extreme Management Makeover, Prof. has pointed more details of a smart service desk, where an employee open a ticket to express a complaint and route to an internal staff member for resolution.

If this can work with a huge billion dollar global enterprise, why not rest?

Let’s see how we can achieve a self service desk in any organisation

1. Identify all service categories (Eg:- On-boarding, Payroll, Cafeteria, Logistics, IT)
2. Standardize Service Level Agreements (Eg:- When a service ticket is raised, first resolution will be given in 1 working day)
3. Find first level owner for each service category (Eg:- Accounts Officer for Payroll, Transport Manager for Logistics)
4. Find Escalation Manager for each service category (Eg:- HR Manager for Payroll)
5. Identify a person who monitor complete service desk transactions, generate reports and come up with trends and inferences
6. Prepare a simple SOP for self service desk and circulate among employees
7. Ensure necessary process orientation to employees, before starting the service desk

It could create huge paper work and further administrative hurdles, if decides to implement the self service desk, manually. So my strong recommendation is to go for an IT enabled self service desk.

For automation, I would suggest not to get into in house legacy system development. Greytip Online could be a good choice. You may explore and identify couple of similar tools, evaluate and finalize the most suitable one for your organisation and roll out..