Mick McGuinness
Mick McGuinness AP co-founder & DBmarlin Product Manager

Why Service Desk calls are just the tip of the iceberg

Why Service Desk calls are just the tip of the iceberg

IT Service Desks are inherently reactive rather than proactive in nature. A user calls in to log an issue which is then dealt with, but without really understanding how many other users in the organisation could be suffering with the same issue. Furthermore the absence of a call to the service desk implies that everything is OK when in fact many problems could be lurking but have gone unreported.

The serious flaw in this model is that it relies on the end-user to pick up the phone and log a call. Studies have shown that the percentage of genuine issues that fail to result in a logged ticket is worryingly high. In fact in most cases, the majority of service impacting issues are in fact left unreported.

As end-users of IT, do we pickup the phone and sit in a queue waiting to speak to someone on the service desk every time an application crashes or become unresponsive? What about if our PC freezes or blue screens? For most of us probably not, we simply kill and restart the application or reboot our machines. So the reality is that the Service Desk has no idea how often users are getting frustrated by IT problems which prevent them from doing their job. 

By looking only at the information reported to the service desk they are only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

If the Service Desk were able to have visibility into every user’s device  to see all the crashes and freezes across the entire user estate, they could start to see the bigger picture which might help to identify trends and recurring issues within service delivery. 

Fortunately there is a solution out there which can do all this. Nexthink is able to track every binary running on every end-user device in your organisation and report back on all aspects of its behaviour including crashes, freezes, resource usage, slow performance and much more. It allows IT to become proactive by seeing the bigger picture and allows it to focus on the incidents with the biggest impact (which might not necessarily be the one with the highest call volumes).

Nexthink also integrates with Service Desk solutions such as ServiceNow or Remedy to augment the information available to Service Desk staff when troubleshooting issues and lets staff click through in context to see the bigger picture of who else might be suffering in silence.

Download the Nexthink Brochure to find out more.

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