Follow the Sun

Some global or international organizations may wish to combine two or more of their geographically dispersed Service Desks to provide a 24-hour follow-the-sun service. For example, a Service Desk in Asia–Pacific may handle calls during its standard office hours and at the end of this period it may hand over responsibility for any open incidents to a European-based desk. That desk will handle these calls alongside its own incidents during its standard day and then hand over to a USA-based desk – which finally hands back responsibility to the Asia–Pacific desk to complete the cycle.

This can give 24-hour coverage at relatively low cost, as no desk has to work more than a single shift. However, the same safeguards of common processes, tools, shared database of information and culture must be addressed for this approach to proceed – and well-controlled escalation and handover processes are needed.

Specialized Service Desk groups

For some organizations it might be beneficial to create ‘specialist groups’ within the overall Service Desk structure, so that incidents relating to a particular IT service can be routed directly (normally via telephony selection or a web-based interface) to the specialist group. This can allow faster resolution of these incidents, through greater familiarity and specialist training.

The selection would be made using a script along the lines of ‘If your call is about the X Service, please press 1 now, otherwise please hold for a Service Desk analyst’.

Care is needed not to over complicate the selection, so specialist groups should only be considered for a very small number of key services where these exist, and where call rates about that service justify a separate specialist group.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 1006