3-Step Guide to Mourning the Service Desk

Don’t let the service desk of the past haunt your IT strategy of the future. The days of waiting for tickets or calls to come in from angry or frustrated employees and reacting after the fact are over. With the help of Vanson Bourne , we surveyed 1000 IT professionals and 72% agree that the traditional service desk will cease to exist in the next three years. So how do you move forward? What does the future look like?  

It’s all about Experience – Digital Employee Experience  

 As remote and hybrid work continue to grow, DEX empowers companies to create adaptable and resilient IT environments that meet evolving employee needs. With insights into employee technology usage and preferences, IT can proactively address issues and personalize support leading to less down time, more innovation, and happier employees. So how do you get started?

Step 1: Sell Your Executives on DEX

If your executives think the traditional reactive service desk model is “good enough” they’re wrong, and it’s in your company’s best interest to convince them otherwise. In Emily Schlick ’s session from #NexthinkExperience24 she highlights the importance of finding out what truly matters to your leadership. Once you know their goals, be sure you’re prepared to explain how DEX initiatives will support their strategic business objectives and have case studies on hand to prove cost savings, reduced IT tickets, and improved employee retention.

Most of the time, what matters is the bottom line and based on the results from our survey, we found that 87% agree that without a proactive capability, the future of incident response will be economically unstable. If they want to save money and be more efficient, they need a new model for IT service delivery. Watch Emily’s full session for a step-by-step guide to executive buy in.

Step 2: Build Your DEX Team

Executives think investing in DEX is worth it. ✅ Now it’s time to build out your DEX team because 96% of respondents think that most EUC teams will have a team dedicated to user experience/ Digital Employee Experience within the next three years and you don’t want to fall behind. You’ll need to start by defining the key roles and skills you’ll need and how this team will engage with the business as a whole. Dan Franciscus and Bhavin Shah from Johnson & Johnson shared how they structure their DEXOps teams and it’s a great reference point to get going. Their four areas of focus include automation & data, proactive IT, enterprise insights, and platform operations. You may not have the perfect candidate right away, but this provides an opportunity to offer your employees training and development that will not only help achieve your goals, but help advance their careers as well. Check out Dan and Bhavin’s full session from Experience below to see how they are reimagining IT with DEX in mind.

Step 3: Scale Your DEX Program

As you develop a DEX framework, you’ll want you establish clear and scalable processes and guidelines that allow your program to grow alongside your company and invest in tools that adapt to the everchanging and complex IT environments. DEX may start with EUC, but the more value you can show the more you’ll expand into other departments. Jim Jacob from Leidos shared actionable advice at Experience on how to measure value and track success and how by doing so they’ve been able to expand their impact across other functions. You can watch his full session on Proving Value and Scaling Across the Organization below.

ICYMI

🎥 Watch all the replays from Experience Boston on-demand.

📖 Read the full Death (and Rebirth) of the Service Desk report.