Use experience-level agreements to elevate IT service satisfaction

Imagine that you and a friend go to a beautiful restaurant and the server comes over—not with a menu, a glass of water, and a cheery welcome, but with a service-level agreement (SLA) containing 25 key performance indicators (KPIs) that the restaurant intends to meet over the course of the next hour.

The server goes on to explain that for the service to work in line with the SLA, you, the customer, can request only one modification to the menu as presented unless you had made the request at the time of the reservation.

How would you respond? I am guessing you'd be bewildered.

Likewise, consider that most IT service organizations today exist—with a considerable amount of cost and effort—to measure and report data. But how much of that data is relevant to anyone using the service organization's service?

SLAs dominate our IT service management teams, our sourcing contracts, and our underpinning arrangements—agreements that support the SLA. Meanwhile, customer approval scores have barely budged; the average customer satisfaction with service desks, or outsourcing suppliers, hasn't significantly improved since the introduction of SLAs and KPIs. I am not saying that SLAs have no place; they do, just not at the front of the house.

Measuring what you can is not the same as doing what you must. It's time for a change. It's time to pivot from managing IT services to managing the consumer's experience of IT with experience-level agreements (XLAs).

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Innovative Report on Service Desk Software Market to 2025

Change management as we know it is outdated and ineffective, with nearly 70 percent of all change projects failing to achieve their goals. That’s why today’s IT teams are no longer just solving change management issues – they’re predicting them. The most common IT service management (ITSM) issue during a large change is an application outage, when a system or platform shuts down and is no longer operational. Something as simple The Service Desk Software Market report gives a detailed overview of the dynamics of the industries, which impacts on the growth of businesses. The study comprises a blend of various segments such as drivers, restraints, and opportunities. Different scenarios are examined in this report along with the top driving factors and that offers the ways for business expansion. The effective strategies are implemented by the various top-level key players to shape the businesses.

The Service Desk Software Market to grow at a CAGR of +10% during the period 2019-2026.

Help desk software refers to a computer program that empowers client care administrators monitor client demands and manage other client care-related issues. … By and large, help work area programming is a piece of an umbrella class called benefit work area, which incorporates resource the board and IT benefit the executives.

Top key Players: Samanage, Freshservice, ManageEngine ServiceDesk, JIRA Service Desk, Zendesk, Track-It!, BMC Remedy 9,Cherwell IT Service Management, Agiloft, Re:Desk, ServiceNow, GoToAssist, Spiceworks, Easy Vista, Wolken

Apart from this, the research report offers the vital key segmentation of the market that merges on the development rate and market of Service Desk Software Market. The key drivers, opportunities, difficulties and the forthcoming trends of the market is well explained to the viewers for their better understanding. Similarly, its key products, end users, applications and technological details are emphasized in this report.

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How to Get a Job as an IT Service Desk Agent

Getting a job on a corporate IT service desk is a great idea if you want a career in tech. The IT service desk is a common entry-level role into the tech industry, which means that you don’t usually need fancy qualifications or a super-techy brain to get on board.

The IT service desk can be the perfect place to gain an understanding of the world of IT and will also give you a great view of other IT and business departments. This can be incredibly beneficial if you’re not sure which career path you ultimately want to take.

It’s also a great place to get to know the company you work for and the products they offer. You don’t just see them, you get right down into the depths of them – learning what they are and how they work. This will put you in great stead for internal promotions, as well as giving you transferable skills to take elsewhere when you’re ready to leave.

But how do you get a job as an IT service desk agent? What skills and experience do you need to get an interview and then land the role? This article looks at some of the essential skills that make for a great service desk agent, along with advice on the experience and qualifications that will help you to land the job.

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Is your service desk ready to be measured?

If your business had to pay for its IT services would they pay for your Service Desk or would they look externally and pay a third party to deliver this service?


It’s a very competitive space we now operate in and having the ability to prove to your business that you are delivering services to industry recognised targets is a great way to stay ahead of the competition.  Whether you plan to go down the accreditation route such as an ISO standard or the Service Desk Institute Certification programmed or simply deliver excellence outside of these schemes its important to have a benchmark to base your goals around.


Service desks typically provide services based on core ITIL processes. These vary from process to process, an understanding of how and why you should create these processes and being prepared to be measured against these sends out a big statement.


Service Management Managers have to ensure their teams are aligned and share the vision and passion that is required to be held up and counted. By having clear and measurable objectives your team will be able to see the vision and understand the steps that need to be collectively taken to reach the final goal. Motivated and target driven staff will stay focused and strive to deliver quality service time after time.

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Best Help Desk Certifications 2019

Technical support and help desk positions remain traditional points of entry into IT for many people nowadays. One way to make yourself stand out as a help desk professional is to validate your knowledge and skills by earning one of these leading help desk certifications.

Although training and credentials for help desk positions are available, many candidates come into these jobs fresh out of college or from other fields without the benefit of formal help desk certifications. Perhaps that's why we're seeing ongoing interest in these certifications, with an increasing tendency for high schools, community colleges and even some four-year institutions to include elements of help desk training in their curricula. Some also embed certificate or certification content and even help desk credentials in their programs outright.

When it comes to help desk positions, a small number of certificate and certification programs focus mainly on the help desk function and the various job roles it supports. A greater number of credentials that style themselves as verifying technical support skills are also available, where many such credentials focus on specific sets of vendor platforms and products.

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Increase IT Service Desk Agent Motivation with Employee Experience Feedback

The many issues with traditional IT service desk metrics

When you consider the many metrics applied to your IT service desk agents, are they predominantly focused on “how many?” and “how fast?” With customer satisfaction the obvious exception.
As I wrote in my previous blog, “…traditional service desk metrics drive the wrong behaviors. That, in particular, agents are currently measured by speed and not the value they create. In practice, they’re measured on ‘how fast they get rid of their customers’.”

So, are volume and speed metrics really the best way to measure your IT support success? And, just as importantly, will the statistics around volumes and speed do much, if anything, to motivate your agents?

What influences a better employee (end-user) experience?

What do you think it takes to deliver a great employee experience? The best processes? The best technology? Or the best people? I imagine that you probably replied (in your head) – the best people. Or you might have been greedy and said all three.

Of course, I could have flipped this, and asked: “What do you think is likely to deliver the worst employee experience?” Subpar processes? Subpar technology? Or subpar people? Hopefully, your answer to this would again be people.

My point is that your people – your IT service desk agents – are incredibly important to the quality of your IT support and the delivered employee experience.

The next obvious question is then: “How are they important?” And the answer is probably not what you think.

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What is an IT Service Desk?

The IT Service Desk is intended to be a primary point of engagement between users and an IT organization. According to ITIL, the service desk is the single point of contact (SPOC) between the service provider (IT) and users for day-to-day activities. A typical service desk manages incidents (service disruptions) and service requests (routine service related tasks) along with handling user communications for things like outages and planned changes to services. A service desk typically has a broad scope and is designed to provide the user with a single place to go for all their IT needs. This results in the service desk playing a pivotal role in facilitating the integration of business processes with the technology ecosystem and broader service management infrastructure.

What is a Service Desk?

• Service Desk vs Help Desk
• Benefits
• Best Practices
• Service Desk Software

Where did IT Service Desks Come From?

The IT helpdesk function was born in the late 1980s as a support capability to fix IT issues. It was a highly technical function focused on the technology rather than the end users. Early IT helpdesks didn’t have the concept of SLAs or time-based targets for resolving issues. It wasn’t until ITIL came onto the scene in the 1990s, capturing IT Service Management best practices, that the concept of the user-centric IT service desk began to emerge. The service desk was seen as an essential part of “managing IT like a service”.

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