Law firm Linklaters has achieved a 3 Star Service Desk
Institute (SDI) accreditation rating for its IT help desk, which
supports 5,500 staff across 28 countries.
Eddy Smerdon, manager of UK IT Support Desk at
Linklaters, said,
"Our objectives were twofold: to ensure a consistent high standard
of user experience, and to give our service desk analysts a goal to
work towards. Each of the 14 service desk team members achieved an
individual SDI qualification, which took around a year to
complete."
The year-long process for SDI accreditation has allowed Smerdon
to formalise the help desk structure at Linklaters and improve the
response time for help desk calls. He said, "89% of calls to the
support desk are fixed by first-line support and we spend 3.5
minutes per call on average."
He now runs three levels of support: 90% of calls are answered
by first-line support staff; 9% by second line staff, who focus on
root cause analysis; and 1% is third-line, which may involve custom
coding. This is outsourced to Perot Systems.
The company provides a per head training budget, which Smerdon
said has been used to provide staff with computer-based training to
enable support staff to train and obtain Microsoft Office
Specialist certification. This allows the team to solve more
queries on first-line support. "There's an element of
competitiveness in the team. Several of the team have achieved all
the Microsoft Office accreditations," he said.
The SDI Service Desk
Certification standards covers all aspects of Linklaters'
service desk operation in terms of management, staff, resources,
tools, training and delivery, strategy, planning and continuous
service improvement.
The certification process involved a full review of the
company's entire service desk operation using interviews, desk-side
observations and a review of service level metrics. The audit took
four days and involved an SDI auditor asking more than 300
comprehensive questions in order to assess the service desk's
maturity rating.
The audit showed that Linklaters needed to improve its data
capture management processes and user experience. Linklaters
consequently set up an internal focus group made up of a
cross-section of their user base to invite open feedback.
Howard Kendall, founder and chairman of SDI, said, "Supporting
IT for such a global organisation is pressured, and each analyst
and manager has worked hard individually, and as a team, to meet
these criteria and so thoroughly deserve their certification
awards. The SDI 3 star Accreditation is a reflection of the
excellent level of IT support service that Linklaters is delivering
to all its users."
Linklaters now intends to start working towards SDI
certification of its New York and Hong Kong service desks later
this year.
SDI accreditation
1. Leadership
How all levels of management and other staff in team leadership
roles define success, and inspire and drive continuous
improvement.
2. Policy & Strategy
Service desk management incorporates the organisation's values
and quality concepts into the definition, communication, review,
and improvement of service desk policies and strategies.
3. People & Management
Realising the full potential of human resources.
4. Partnerships & Resources
Access to the resources and tools necessary to achieve
objectives.
5. Processes
How the IT support operation identifies, reviews, documents, and
revises its processes and procedures in order to deliver optimal
levels of support.
6. People Satisfaction
People (support staff) drive the quality of service and support.
Satisfied people are crucial to successful support. The
organisation's perception and feelings about support centre staff
are essential to its long-term success.
7. Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction information is regularly captured and
used, and it is aligned to the organisation's objectives and the
expectations of customers.
8. Performance Results
The IT support operation's performance results are measured
against its planned performance.
9. Social Responsibility
The Service Desk strives to understand and respond to the
expectations of their stakeholders. It comprehensively measures and
achieves outstanding results with respect to society.