In the quest for efficiency, service desk managers are constantly asking questions. How can we reduce the number of incoming calls? And how can we...
As probably everyone knows by now, there's an ever-growing interest in self-service and automation. And that's great! It has a ton of benefits for...
If you're looking for a way to decrease the amount of time spent on recurring calls, investing in Knowledge Management is a great strategy. At a...
Picture your life before automated check-in kiosks, supermarket barcode scanners, and online banking services. Can you still remember what things...
We know life at the service desk can get tricky at times. With so many incoming requests, it can make you feel like pulling your hair out. IT...
Getting knowledge management right has never been easy. You know that in the long run, recording the knowledge of your service desk could help your...
Handling incidents at the service desk can be quite a time sink. Your team needs to register, categorize, prioritize and assign every single call to...
For the third consecutive year, we’re predicting the top service management trends to sweep the industry in 2021. Last year, I said that most trends...
Industry expert Stephen Mann introduces the first blog in a series all about IT management capabilities that complement IT Service Management (ITSM)....
The IT department is responsible for all things IT. Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Wrong. Hidden in the dark and shrouded in mystery, shadow...
Ready to try your hand at customer journey mapping? This customer journey example shows you exactly what happens when Oliver requests a laptop from...
Industry expert Stephen Mann shares the seven most important day-to-day responsibilities of a shared services manager and the personal traits that...
What’s the difference between cooperation and collaboration? And why are some organizations so afraid of the latter? In his second guest blog,...
There’s never been a greater digital training course than the coronavirus crisis, according to Steven van Belleghem, thought leader in the field of...
Industry expert Stephen Mann is back with another blog. Today, he explains how a shared services model extends the benefits of Enterprise Service...
Where does your organization stand in terms of its service delivery? Are the service departments in your organization healthy, or do they lack...
In the past decade, and especially in the past few months, digitalization has shifted from a novelty to the new norm. But technology isn’t the only...
Change management processes sometimes become overly complicated. When you get too caught up in the process, you tend to forget to involve your...
Working from home has been – and will be – the norm for quite some time. But that doesn’t mean you can’t prepare for your return to the office in...
Scrum and agile ITSM are hot topics discussed across the internet, in the elevator, or while waiting in line at the coffee machine. But how does it...
Inspired by the Mars rover mission that’s supposed to launch on 20 July 2020, we started thinking about the frontiers of the service desk. Will the...
Wouldn’t it be great to have completely stress-free workplaces? Unfortunately, this is unrealistic – stress is part and parcel of life, and work is...
Why is having a single point of contact (SPOC) so important for Enterprise Service Management? In his first guest blog, industry expert Doug Tedder...
You’ve probably heard of the many benefits of Enterprise Service Management (ESM) before. But how do you launch ESM in your organization? Use one of...
Industry expert Stephen Mann is back with another blog! Today, he shares what makes or breaks your Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Discover how to...
Successful organizational culture. When I say it, one company automatically comes to mind: Google. Everyone would love to play games at their...
Enterprise Service Management: it’s a huge buzzword in the service management community. Thinking about hopping on the bandwagon yourself? First, you...
Do you work at a municipality? And are you responsible for IT or citizen support? Then listen up. I’ll explain why you need each other to provide...
You're trying to increase your customer satisfaction score or improve the image of your IT department. Have you considered mapping your customer...
So you want to set targets for your department. But where do you start? You’ve done your research and everybody who is anybody is saying service desk...
Since the majority of people have to work from home for the foreseeable future, your customers will definitely use your self-service portal more...
In his previous blog, industry expert Stephen Mann explained why ITIL problem management adoption levels are so low – and why that’s a problem....
We’ve talked about the benefits of Enterprise Service Management (ESM) before. But what does it look like in real life? Utrecht University embarked...
The change process can be long and tedious, slowing down your organization. How can you make it more agile? By reinventing the CAB (Change Advisory...
You know about ITIL 4. And you know it’s not flawless. But how does it handle problem management? We’re excited to present this guest blog by...
IT organizations are outsourcing increasingly more services. This raises the question: how do you keep your service quality high when you’re working...
How will ITSM change in the coming year? Just like we did last year, we collected the 5 most relevant ITSM trends for 2020 that will change service...
You’ve heard of DevOps. You know it means that development and IT operations will work together more. The goal is to make better products for...
Self-service, Shift Left and AI free up time that your service desk staff can use to focus on important and recurring problems. Given that these are...
It’s October again. It's time for Halloween, so it’s the season to be scared. It’s probably not a coincidence that October is also Cyber Security...
Service desks are getting more customer-oriented, but their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) stay the same. We still measure duration and response...
The tickets keep rolling in and they are all over the place. Of course, the blocked printer on floor 7 takes a back seat if all of the company’s...
Happy Sysadmin day! It’s the perfect day in the year to celebrate system administrators. Which you should do, because where would you be without...
The modern office. What does it look like? Do you still have a dedicated workplace or can you take your laptop and sit wherever you choose? Do you...
How do you improve your Customer Experience without increasing your budget? This is the conundrum for many service desks. The answer can come from an...
Why do so many people hate their jobs? And why do others go to work with a spring in their step? Disgruntled employees tend to complain about the...
HBO’s hugely successful Game of Thrones is coming to its 8th and final season. Now before we get all teary-eyed and find out who ends up on the Iron...
So, you’re ready to improve your services. Making a customer journey sounds like a plan, but what’s the goal of customer journey mapping? And once...
Last week saw the publication of the first part of ITIL 4: ITIL Foundation. In this blog I'll answer all your burning questions about ITIL 4. Such...
When you think of agile working methods, Scrum is one that quickly comes to mind. But while Scrum works great for implementing changes and projects,...
You don’t get satisfied customers by trying to be the best at everything. Sometimes it’s better to outsource certain tasks. But how much should you...
We asked IT experts from all around the globe about the state of their self-service. Our survey included questions such as: Through which channels do...
Are you about to merge two or more service desks? Perhaps due to a merger of companies, or a centralization within your organization? The key to...
Agile has been a standard way of collaborating within software development departments for years. Nowadays, Agile is used more and more in other...
Are you planning to do an improvement project within your organization? Consider performing a baseline measurement first. You’ll increase the chance...
Thanksgiving’s right around the corner. How do you prepare? Do you lock yourself up in your kitchen for days, or do you cook with family and friends?...
In this video series, we explain an ITSM concept in about 45 seconds. This week: KCS, a.k.a. Knowledge Centered Service. What is it? And how does it...
What’s the difference between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty? How can you measure whether your customers are satisfied and will keep...
So, you want to use feedback to improve your service department. But where do you start? Gökhan Tuna, customer feedback expert at TOPdesk, has got a...
In this video series, we explain an ITSM concept in about 60 seconds. This week, we cheated a little bit: we needed 76 seconds to explain Shared...
How do you measure customer satisfaction and customer loyalty? This is trickier than you might think! I believe there is a difference between...
What do IT customer satisfaction and the cloud have in common? A co-worker recently asked me to explain the relationship between the two in 300 words...
Artificial Intelligence – AI – is a popular topic at service management events. It’s exciting and full of promise for a brighter future. But what are...
We understand that IT managers get a lot of questions… because here at TOPdesk we get them too. There are no bad questions, only slightly amusing...
In my previous blog, I told you how to map a customer journey in 10 steps to improve your internal service delivery. This will ensure that your...
ITSM is always changing. We’re constantly developing new technologies in a bid to make businesses run more efficiently. While that’s all well and...
Change Management can be a rather rigid and long-winded process. Do you want to make your change implementations more agile? There are different ways...
Employee experience is the new business rage, so it seems. Earlier this year, Forbes proclaimed 2018 to be the year of Employee Experience, and you...
A good, proactive Problem Management process is a crucial way to minimize the impact of disruptions whilst increasing satisfaction and trust, of your...
A classic Change process can be long-winded and rigid. Can you make the process more agile? In this post in our agile blog series, we’ll discuss...
Consistently meeting your Incident Management KPIs and matching SLAs is something we all contend with on a monthly, weekly and sometimes daily basis....
At the end of the day, it's your Service Desk customers have the last word about your services. And that's why it's increasingly important that you...
Help desk software as solution Good help desk software will help streamline your day-to-day help desk operations. Often, it will include a ticketing...
One of my recent consultancy projects was working with London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), increasing Self-Service portal uptake....
There's a focus shift in Service Management from numbers to experience. We see this in the growing focus on XLAs and CX and other cool acronyms....
What do you know about Customer Experience Managers? It's a popular role with companies as a whole, but not typically with Service Desks. What does...
Do you have questions about moving to more Agile Service Management, and the implications of doing so? Consultant Bas Blanken - author of our Agile...
New responsibilities and dozens of new faces at the same time: a first day can be quite overwhelming. As part of the HR team (or another Service...
Want to exceed your customer’s expectations? Take one step back. Create a sound foundation by taking away all obstacles your customers might have....
Introducing an agile way of working means a culture shift at your IT department. Some embrace the change, others might not be so eager to change the...
Imagine it’s your first day at your new job. You don’t know where to go and hope everything is ready for you. Well, the problem is - in many...
You have some new starters coming in and you want to improve your employee onboarding process. But you don’t know where to start. Well, the first...
Contrary to what some people believe, the Agile mindset and service management go together quite nicely, as I explained in my previous post blog. But...
IT is falling deeply in love with Agile. But is a happy marriage between agile service management and watertight ITIL processes really possible? We...
Making the most of self service will save you work in the long run, but also requires a bit of work to get going. To get the most out of it, you need...
We love changes, if they are for the better. But Change Management is still arguably the ITIL-process that causes most people on a project the most...
So you have successfully created an array of reports and figures that can tell you everything about every aspect of every call ever logged. Great!...
One of the tasks of the change manager is to make sure new standard services can be delivered multiple times without problems. To guarantee this...
In our previous blogs we explained why IT needs an alternative for ITIL, and introduced a Best Practices for Service Management (BPSM) to help you...
The way forward for ITSM is customer focus. Think all you want about how you manage incidents efficiently, but if you don't put your customer in...
For decades, service management frameworks such as ITIL have shaped how supporting departments go about their daily tasks. So why are organisations...
Are all new employees in your organization ready for work right away? Do they have everything they need for their job, such as a desk, entry pass and...
What key metrics do you keep track of? When almost any interaction with your Service Department can be monitored, it's important to be able to pull...
In Incident Management, we often overlook the simple things in favour of trying to do too much, too soon. Why not make sure we’ve done the...
Shared Service Management is an important development in interdepartmental collaboration between the supporting departments of an organization. It...
According to the Service Desk Institute (SDI), 90 per cent of organizations have more than one service desk and 55 per cent are planning for shared...
Supporting departments within organizations have traditionally focused on managing and continually improving their own services. However, end users...
Supporting departments within organizations have traditionally focused on managing and improving their own services. However, end users are becoming...