IT Service Desk: A Beginners Guide

1. Introduction: Welcome to today's class, a beginner's guide to the IT service desk. I'm your host, Matthew, the service desk coach. My mission is to coach and mentor those that are beginning their IT journey and Korea. And I'd like to thank you for giving me your time. In this class. I'll be guiding you through the fundamentals of what a service desk and what the core duties of a service desk analysts will briefly discuss some of the key outcomes that are service desk is responsible for an industry best practice methodology to enable IT businesses to achieve this outcome. Next, we'll talk about general IT troubleshooting. At which point I'll provide a framework you can adopt and apply in your current or future position. I'll go into detail about how to best compiled ticket notes. You'll also be provided a code script outline we can adopt immediately to handle him down telephone calls. And I'll delve a little further into corporate etiquette. At the end of the lesson, you'll have gained a working knowledge of water service desk is and how you can best performing the role. You'll also walk away with practical frameworks, which will have your manager or team leader coming to you as the go-to person. With that said, I'll see you in class. 2. Project Video: Thanks for joining me. Before we begin the course content. I'd like to share a quick note. After having completed this course. And 18 question, multiple choice. Online tests will be made available for you. Once you've finished the course, head over to the project tab, where you will find the instructions and web link to take the test. Off. The 18 questions for ranking bands exist. If you school one to four points, you're a budding trainee. Good effort, you demonstrate premise and we can't wait to see you. What development? School, five to nine points. Congratulations. You've just found yourself and if Junior Service Desk analyst's role, you're in an exciting time and go Korea. If you school, tend to pull ten points. Well done on being promoted to service desk analysts. Go proactive approach in great customer service has landed you a great opportunity. If you school 15 to 18 points, you're a senior on the team now, perhaps well, on your way to becoming a team leader, keep at it and I can assure you you will get that opportunity. Make a note to return to this video after you have completed the test to see how you ranked. You can take it multiple times and I would encourage you to do so. Learning from our mistakes, after all, is how we learn best. Lastly, please upload a screenshot of the test result into the project gallery to close out the deliverable for the course. If you have any questions, head on over to the discussion tab and ask away. Without further ado. Thanks for watching, and let's get into the first-class. 3. Lesson 1 - Service Desk Responsibilities: Lesson one, service desk responsibilities. Before we can effectively understand how to perform as a Service Desk Analyst, we must understand what a service desk is. Simply put, the service desk is the central and primary point of communication for customers into the world of IT. If a company chooses to outsource its IT service desk, it can choose for it to be structured in two ways. They can adopt either a dedicated all leveraged modal choice is dependent on the customer's business requirements and budget. Dedicated service desk model uses a set number of service desk analysts dedicated to supporting one customer's IT support requirements. A leveraged service desk modal, or sometimes referred to as a shared model, is when a set number of service desk analysts provide IT support to multiple clients. If you're just starting on a service desk, it's easier to begin in a dedicated model. As it means, you only need to learn one customers sets of IT processes and procedures. After you've gained some experience, you'll be ready to take on more clients in a leveraged tomato. Most customers will contact the service desk whenever they need the IT support group to do anything. This is because they will need a ticket number to track the issue. E.g. say, you were going to contact your mobile telephone provider because you wanted to phone number, you would need to contact the service desk line to facilitate this change. It is no different from Mr. Joe Bloggs. We need a password reset on Monday morning. E2 would need to call his IT service desk and requests that he's password reset. The agent would then ask a series of questions to verify his identity and then proceed to reset the password. Now, there are a few ways that customers or users can interact or engage with the service desk. Oftentimes, they will go through well, they may email through their request or issue. It is then the responsibility of the service desk analysts to receive that call or email and create a ticket for it in the ticketing tool set used by the company. Assigned from taking calls, making callbacks, or responding to e-mails. The service desk analyst is responsible for managing their own queue of tickets. This will usually involve ensuring that your assigned tickets updated at least every second day. This leads to the next core responsibility of a service desk analysts, which is to create or update knowledge. Inevitably, there will be periods of downtime, which is when you can focus on improving processes or procedures are already in place. Oftentimes, maintaining knowledge is not done very well. This is an area that separates those analysts who are deemed good on those who are thought of as great. Now that we have a foundational understanding of what a service desk is and what the role in bulbs. Let's continue in the course to learn more about an SLA. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next class. 4. Lesson 2 - What are SLA's: Lesson two. What's our SLAs? Slas stands for service level agreement. It's an IT industry known term used to refer to key metrics that define if an operational team, such as the service desk, is meeting agreed with expectation. There are different types of SLAs that exist for the service desk and let's focus on some of those now. One SLA that exists is called coal and so the definition of the coal and so SLA is that for each month, the service desk must answer at least X percent pulls within seconds. An example of this is that 80 per cent of goals must be answered within 20 s. If the service desk achieves or exceeds this metric for the month, the SLA is green. Conversely, the SLA is red if the service desk fails to meet this metric. This type of SLA is shows that a service desk analysts will be available to answer a user's full within 20 s. Sure. That may be closed, that take a little longer. But most calls are answered quickly. And most clients are comfortable with this type of approach. Its popularity. Companies with larger budgets that would like heightened availability can request cool answer SLAs as high as 99 per cent within a set number of seconds. Another key SLA that is reported on monthly ticket resolution time. Typically, resolution time is the amount of time that exists between when the customer first opens a ticket and when that ticket is then resolved. Or different priorities can exist for a ticket 123.4. Each ticket priority will have its own defined SLA. But don't worry, as a Service Desk Analyst, it's rare that you'll be handling anything other than a priority three or priority for. A common example of a priority for ticket resolution, satellite is five business days. Simply, a priority three ticket may have a heightened SLA, such as two business days. Usually, priority two and priority one tickets are handled by a separate team. Due to the business critical nature of those types of tickets. They often come attached with very tight resolution SLAs ranging anywhere 2-6 h. Having a separate team ensures adequate management and oversight is in place to ensure IT service providers meet those agreed client expectations. Lastly, another common SLA for the service desk is a term called FCR, stands for first call resolution, sometimes referred to as First Contact Resolution, is a metric used to measure the percentage of customer inquiries or tickets result on the first call versus those that need to be loved. Investigation. An example of how this works, say service desk received 100 calls for the month and 65 of those calls the service desk were able to resolve on that same quote. This would mean that the FCR percentage for the month would be 65%. And industry average for FC sits anywhere in the range of 60 to 70 per cent. If you find yourself performing higher than this, it's usually a good sign that you're in a high performing team and you may be ready for a new challenge. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next class. 5. Lesson 3 - Introduction to ITIL: Lesson three, Introduction to ITIL. You may be wondering what ITIL is. Well, to start as ITIL stands for information technology infrastructure library. It's a framework used by IT companies and professionals that standardizes the delivery and maintenance of IT services in the business. More commonly is Practices known as ITSM, which stands for IT service management. There are five cool streams that underpin ITIL as a framework. Service strategy. This design, service transition. So this operations and continue service improvement. Today, I'm only going to discuss two of those five streams and their relationship to the service desk. Service operations and CSI. Let's talk about service operations. This dream relates to the delivery of IT support, the area of the framework the Services operates within. I'm going to talk specifically about full key ticket categories that exist within service operations. Category one is called incident management. I tilt defines an incident as an unplanned interruption to quality reduction of an IT service? In basic terms, it means something is broken and not working. Ticket type correlated to this category is called an incident. A real-world example of this type of ticket would be if someone calls the service desk and said they compute a suddenly froze and is now unresponsive. Statistics, but log a ticket and then begin the process of troubleshooting the issue. Now, there is also a requirement to prioritize each incident. Incident priority ratings are determined by choosing an impact school and cross-referencing it against the agency school. In the incident management matrix. The matrix will look like this, and it will tell you how to determine the priority rating of a ticket. Tickets can have a priority of P1, P2, P3, or P4. E.g. a. Ticket, the high impact and low urgency would be prioritized as a P3. According to the incident management matrix. Every company will have its own variation of the incident management matrix and the table listed here. Because a guide or anything, you should always refer to your company's specific incident management matrix. Which brings us to Category two, which is called request fulfilled. Until defines a service request as a formal request from a user for something to be provided. E.g. a. Request for information or advice, a request to reset a password, or request to install a workstation or a new use of IT. Ticket type correlated to this category is called, you guessed it. Requests. Category3 is called problem management. As I tilt defines it. A problem is a cause or potential cause of one or more incidents. These types of tickets are usually raised by IT support staff proactively and usually occur after analyzing any repeat types of incident tickets. Once a trend is identified, a problem ticket is created and work undertaken by IT support staff to identify the cause behind the repeat tissue. Lastly, category four is called change management. I till defines a change as the addition, modification or removal of anything that could have a direct or indirect effect on IT services. An example of when a change ticket would need to be created is if a networks which needed to be replaced. Network engineer tasks to perform this activity would need to create a change ticket to capture, be changing and why it needs to change. Network engineer would also need to list any potential risks that could arise from changing this variable in the IT environment. And what the remediations to those risks. As pods are, the final step in the change management process. Network engineer is to then seek approval from the change approval board, will have the full proceeding to perform the list and work. This layer of the service operation stream ensures that the appropriate IT governance practices are in place to safeguard an unplanned outages. The final stream we will discuss on this phi tilde Crash Course is CSI, continue service improvement. The title of the category defines it perfectly. The entire stream is aimed at continual learning from prior successes and failures and aimed constantly to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of IT services and processes. Doing this proactively will maintain positive relationships and will ensure your team is operating as efficiently as possible. It really is a win-win approach to IT service management. Each of the concepts discussed in this lesson, we'll be exposed to you in practice as the service desk analysts. Will. Having a solid understanding of the principles we talked about will give you an edge over those that fail to or choose to not understand this. That was a beefy video, everyone, I encourage you all to re-watch this one before proceeding to the next lesson. Once you're already, I will join you there. Thanks for watching. 6. Lesson 4 - Common IT Troubleshooting, and the '5 Points Method': Lesson four, common IT troubleshooting and the five points method. One to the technical aspects of the service desk analyst role. The key outcome quiet Service Desk Analyst is to solve or escalate, use it issues or queries. To do this effectively, you will need to understand how to perform effective troubleshooting through a process of elimination. In its simplest form, the strategy behind troubleshooting by elimination is to individually test all potential sources that could be causing the problem. Once you've identified the source of your computer issue, you can then apply the relevant documented actions to solve it. Five points of good troubleshooting using the Elimination approach will usually be enough to either resolve an issue or no, you will need to escalate to a senior engineer to assist. I define the five points method as the capture of five independent attempts to troubleshoot and resolve a user issue, usually listed in bullet points style within the ticket notes. Often it is best to remotely access the user's workstation to perform troubleshooting activities. Here is a top five list of common troubleshooting steps and questions that often work well with the elimination method. One, what's the issue you're experiencing? And how long has this been occurring for? Two, what's the outcome you are trying to achieve? And what is blocking you from doing that? Do you have a workaround available? Can you show me or replicate the issue? Have you colleagues ever been impacted by this day, currently impacted by this issue at all? They may already be a ticket load potentially even with the solution and then reapply it. So this is a worthwhile question to ask him. He is a list of IT troubleshooting steps that you can try. One, close the effected application from the Task Manager and reopen it again. To attempt to restart the workstation. Three, check if the user account is locked out due to consecutive incorrect password attempts. Perhaps. Check if the workstation can access the Internet or personal network drive. By attempt to re-install the application, will the device driver. While this is not a comprehensive list troubleshooting steps. So questions using a combination of the examples provided, both boss track your effectiveness and efficiency as a Service Desk Analyst. That's a wrap on the five points method. Remember to take this on board as a key takeaway. Thanks for your time. Let's hop into the next class. 7. Lesson 5 - Working Remotely: Lesson five, working remotely with the nature of the service desk analyst's role comprised mainly of remote base support via phone or e-mail. Many current job listings are offering hybrid working arrangements with some employees, even offering fulltime working from home physicians. There are a few considerations to understand as part of this working approach. In this lesson, we'll aim to cover a few key items you'll need to be aware of. One, you will most likely need to connect to a VPN each day. This is a virtual private network that allows you to connect your corporate data securely. Everything is monitored to ensure that you only use your workstation in line your companies IT security policies and procedures. To ensure you have a strong Internet connection. You'll be remotely accessing virtual machines, which consumer high amount of bandwidth. If you want to be successful in the role, ensure you get at least 50 to 100 megabit per second on your internet download speed. Three by the right hardware. Ensure you get a wireless headset, wireless cable, and wireless mouse. You'll thank yourself six months into the role that you went wireless. Accompany that with at least two side-by-side 24-inch monitors. This should be the minimum for your setup. The more the better. You can never have too many screens. The ultra wide monitors are of course more expensive. But in my opinion, though that up to exceptional productivity. Small final step to this piece. It's important that you have an external HD cameras, but any meetings that you're invited to pull. Lastly, just as you would be working from home, many of the users you will be supporting also be doing the same thing. So keep this in mind as you perform your troubleshooting. It's good to check on the status of their VPN connection and internet speed as it may be a cause of their issue. Right? So now that we've covered how to work remotely, let's move into the practical side of the road. Constructing a ticket. I'll join you in the next class. Thanks for watching. 8. Lesson 6 - How to Construct a Ticket: Lesson six, how to construct a ticket. Everyone taking this class needs to be able to leave this series knowing how to construct good ticket nights. The approach outlined in this lesson, we'll guide you towards being able to do that. And we'll enable you high-performing service desk analysts. Let's get straight into what a ticket. A ticket is a record of work performed when needing to be performed by IT support personnel to maintain the IT environment, fix issues, and resolve user requests. As we know, there are many ticket categories there. As a Service Desk Analyst, you will cool function is to only raise incidents or requests. Therefore, with exception to obtaining the user's name, we should be categorizing the ticket as soon as possible. This is likely a good segue to discuss the most basic information items that need to be captured for a ticket. Here's a list of common information that you need to capture. Contact details, such as the use his name, phone number, email address, and location. Ticket category, which will either be an incident or request. Ticket classification. E.g. whether the ticket relates to hardware, networking on application. Priority, which as we know, is determined by selecting the appropriate impacting urgency. And the description, which is where you will utilize the five points method to form your troubleshooting notes. In the main body of the ticket notes, commonly referred to as the description. We need to use the ticket structure displayed here. Always. If this is the one thing you take away from this class, that you always apply the relevant structure to your incident or request ticket. You can see that the incidence scenario has two subheadings. The first one is issued, followed by a couple of lines of texts to describe the uses issue. The second one is troubleshooting. And as alluded to earlier, this is where we apply the five points method in practice. Document all your points in this section. The request section. You will notice the structure is largely the same. However, the subheadings have changed. The first one States requests, and we'll provide an area for you to define what the user is requesting concisely. The notes section is then a spot for you to jot down any actions you have already taken. When need to be taken by the team, you will be assigning this ticket to. Now, let's go through a scenario and have a look at how we should apply the above structure in practice. Has called the service desk advising that every time she sends an email, it the app box folder and never sends. She's asking for help with this issue and is currently working from home. Here is an example of how a record of that conversation should be noted in your tickets. As you can see in the top left-hand corner, the relevant contact details are captured. In the bottom left-hand corner. We have the additional priority and categorizations. In order. At the top, in the middle, we have a short summary of what ticket is about. Slightly below that, we have the body of the ticket. Take note of this structure used in this ticket, with it being an incident. You will see the issue and troubleshooting sub-headings, a good breakdown of what the issue was, and the five points method in action, which ultimately led to a resolution. The more practice and repetition in creating tickets you have, the more natural this process will become a quick tip, right? No ticket nodes with the outcome so that anyone can open your ticket and understand what's happening and what actions have been taken already. That was a chunky session. Everyone grab a quick glass of water and then I'll join you in the next class to discuss some basic code scripts. 9. Lesson 7 - Basic Call Scripts: Lesson seven, basic coal scripts. I'm going to walk through the process of taking a call. To start off with. It's common to feel nervous if it's the first time you're taking calls in a service desk environment. The key thing to remember is that you aren't expected to know how to solve everything, to take your time and ensure you gather all the relevant information required. Now, there are three simple cases to a cold. Phase. One, answering the call, phase to taking action, and phase three, ending the course. Your job is to effectively transition the coal through the three phases in an efficient manner. Placing a cola on hold is not always required. Though. We will discuss how to approach this as well. And usually falls under phase two of the coal. Firstly, let's break down into three phases. Then I'll play an example interaction with the cola with the notes from the breakdown put into practice. Phase one, answering the coal. This is where you want to be opening with a consistent grading. And in time, this habit will embed itself into how you operate. The initial greeting is perhaps one of the most important parts of a cool as it quickly establishes the tone and roadmap for the rest of the code. It's important to maintain a positive tone of voice, not a negative one. Like this. Gathering the user's name at the beginning of the coal is also best-practice. Use the coolest name as much as possible and begin building a rapport with them immediately from the startup code. An example of a good grading. Welcome to the service desk. My name is Matthew. How can I help you today? A variation of this that also works as a Service Desk, Matthew, speaking, How can I help you? Let's juxtaposition those positive examples with the poor are greedy. Hello, service desk, How can I help? There's no professionalism in this. Automatically, the callable thinking rude, having not introduced yourself during the answer. It's easy to get caught out on this one. So keep this tucked away as lessons to revisit 12 to 18 months from now phase to taking action. This is the part of the phone call where you will be asking questions and troubleshooting the related issue. Oh, query, someone has cold about. Hence the name taking action. You guessed it. This is the time within the coal. When you need to apply the five points method. Start asking those questions and recording the notes and the ticket. It's advisable to log your notes as you're receiving information from the user. It will also help you in performing your process of elimination. This part of the coal is also the time when only if the quiet across, you can remotely access a user's workstation and review what it is they're trying to do. It could be a simple fix. You already know, like connecting to WiFi. Sometimes you will need to place the user on hold while you're performing any troubleshooting steps. The key thing to do here is to ensure you ask them for permission before doing so. When you take them off hold, you should also thank them for their patients in waiting. I wouldn't recommend placing someone on hold while you work on the computer. I would, however, encouraged building a discussion around the neutral topic, like the weather. Weather from this will go a long way in building trust and not just you, but also your entire team. With that said, once you've taken all the actions required for the goal, you can then proceed to end the quote. Phase three, ending the code. You're at the finish line now. It's time to end the call and give the cola send off that wants to come back for. Once again, it's key that a positive tone of voice is used in phase three. Begin by asking them if there is anything else you can do for them today or if there's any other information that you need. Once you've answered any last questions. Again, acknowledgment that everything is complete. And then state very simply, Thanks for calling the service desk The great day. So that's a wrap on the three phases. I've developed a cold scenario to listen in on demonstrating that theory into practice. But those were the Keen IO. There are strong chances that elements of this call will appear in the final multiple choice Project. Service Desk. Matthew speaking, How can I help you today? Hi mathy. My name is Kate. I'm working from home today and my VPN isn't accepting my new password. Can you help me, please? Absolutely. Cate I would just need to check your account status. Can I please have your last name? Sure. It's cake example. Perfect. Thanks, Kate. Okay. Are you getting any error messages at all? Well, the message I can't keep saying my cat password is incorrect, but I locked in yesterday from home without any issues. I did reset my password yesterday before I logged off. The new password doesn't work. However, the previous phosphate does. Okay, thanks. I'm looking at your account now and it's showing is locked out where you connected to the VPN when you reset your password yesterday. Now, the VPN Autodesk connects up to 8 h and I stayed back. Does that make a difference? Unfortunately, yes, it can impact the corporate network being notified of a password change on your laptop. That said, The next time you're in the office and you connect to a corporate Wi-Fi network or a docking station, the password will update automatically. Until then, proceed using your previous one as a work-around. Okay. That's easy enough. Okay. No worries. It. Ok. Is there anything else that I can help you with today night? That's all. Thanks, Matthew. Thanks for calling the service desk. Kate. Have a good day. Okay. So I'm sure you caught a glimpse of the base flow there. Answering the coal, taking action and ending the code. Degrading was in place. There was no need to place the user on hold. The five points method was used to identify the issue and provide a work around. The coal was wrapped up into a boat, leaving K with a great customer experience. That is the essence of a service esco. Well done on pushing through this lesson, I encourage you every watch and perhaps even writing out the goal script for the service desk agent to help in memorizing the lines. Next up, email etiquette. I will see you in the final class. 10. Lesson 8 - Email Etiquette: Lesson eight, email etiquette. The theme of today's lesson is email etiquette. Let's get stuck into it. An email can be broken down into five areas. The greeting, the opening line, the body, the concluding statement, and the signature. Let's go into detail on each area. The great team. Here are some examples that you can do, whether you are emailing a group or an individual directly. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Hi Keith. Hello, team. I'll which one you use is up to you. Use the most relevant one for each email type. Let's discuss the opening line. The type of firstline will depend on whether you are replying to an email thread or constructing a new email thread. If it's a new email thread, state exactly what it is you want to achieve from this email. In his little words as possible. This will give you an audience contexts for the rest of the email body. If it's a reply email. See below for a couple of common examples I personally use. Thanks for your patience. Thanks to your prompt response. Onto the body. This is where you want to write everything relevant to supporting your opening line. This part of the email can take multiple lines. Therefore, be sure to use paragraphs and limit your sentences to two per paragraph. It's also vital to maintain wants based on the e-mail itself. So make good use of those line breaks in the page and keep those paragraphs visually separated. It doesn't matter how good the content is. If the reader sees a wall of text, they will move on. This is also the area to place any images or directions for ticket resolution. The concluding statement. This is the line that transitions you'll email from the body to completion. So just keep it simple and positive. A few examples include let me know if you have any questions. If you have any issues or concerns, please don't hesitate to contact me. Should you need any clarification on this process? Feel free to set some time in my calendar to discuss rhythm. Lastly, we find ourselves at the signature. You'll be provided a branded signature. In the case of bull company, he worked for insure, you amend the required fields and have this setup as a default signature in Outlook for all new and reply to emails. Before the automatic signature. However, it's important you add your sign off. I've listed a few common ones here. Warm regards. Many things. Hold the best. Sincerely. We got a client who gets those are the five areas that make up an e-mail. Following that framework for any email you write will keep you in good stead. And we'll have your manager taking notice of your Great Britain skills. Here's an example of an email which demonstrates the greeting, the opening line, the body, the concluding statement, and the signature. Email etiquette is a big subject. And the concepts discussed in this lesson at a basic level. If you want more content on this, let me know in the discussion tab. With that said, I'll see you in the final video for a few final words. 11. Conclusion: Welcome to the final video. You made it. That's a wrap on this glass. Everyone. Well done on making it through to the end. Mastering the principles and frameworks guided in this class will enable your success as a Service Desk and others. But remember, it's even more important to be effective. Before being efficient. Understanding how to perform the basics of the role the right way. And then went to try and get faster at doing that through practice and repetition. This approach is far better than skipping corners and delivering a sub-optimal user experience. If I may pop up with some final advice, be patient with yourself. Progress is a side effect of consistency. Consistently aimed to improve by 1% per day, as opposed to trying to do everything all at once and being overwhelmed. The person who improves 1% a day, 365% better over the course of a yield. That's quite a big number. And we'll certainly have, you'll manage out what team lead up, taking notice quite quickly. All the best in your IT career. And please share this with your colleagues and friends if you think they could find value in any of the content delivered until the next class. Thanks for watching and have a great day. This is Matthew, the service desk coach signing off.