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Service Desk - Staff recruitment, responsibilities and rotation.

You probably heard frequently repeated slogans about the greatest value of the company - the people. In fact, this is a truism but you, as a manager should always be conscious of the significance of the fact that your Service Desk - a face of your company - is able to deliver high quality of the service only when the right people are on the right posts. But what does it mean - ‘the right people on the right posts' in this context?
To get the proper answer on this crucial question let's take a look at one of our previous articles about Service Desk overview . Being on the firing line of any impact on SLA mean performing several activities like:

- receiving calls from customer's representative regarding the service disruption,

- tracking and classifying incoming incidents or service requests, attempting initially solutions

- providing an instant and up-to date information on the solution progress,

- informing about expected upgrades, changes to the Customer's environment,

- managing the incident life cycle process from the occurrence until the closure,

- cooperating with both internal groups (Problem Management, second-line) and external support teams in order to redirect incidents properly.

This requires both accuracy and efficiency, flexibility and confidence, technical and nontechnical abilities like customer orientation or empathy. But first of all a team member need to understand what the team work is and how to cope with his partners. Even the best expert but without good team working skills is less valuable than the one with less experience team member who takes care of good relationship and good communication with others. You should not forget about abilities mentioned above during the recruitment campaign.

Keep in mind that the Service Desk posts are usually thought to be a temporary station on the career path of the employee. This is because of special conditions on which the staff is exposed: tight deadlines, stressful contact with dissatisfied client whenever something goes wrong, the necessity to perform several repeating actions, relatively low salary.
You should also minimize the boredom of the work for each of your team and assure the education path or at least leave some space for personal development of each team member. Boredom, which tends to be one of the negative factor felt by the employee could be minimized by reassignment different roles to team members. Letting catch a new experience could increase satisfaction with the work. Rotation within the team has another valuable advantage - your eliminate the situation when one team member is irreplaceable. To conclude, as I tried to state in this article you should seek for the flexible, intelligent, enthusiastic people with a teamwork skill who might not posses an expert knowledge but and are willing to posses it quickly.

Added: 2008-08-27