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For over two decades, Brennan IT has been a trusted partner to organisations across Australia, providing innovative and secure outsourced IT solutions, that empower people to thrive in their working lives. We have always put people first and are crazy about delivering exceptional customer experiences, so it’s no accident that we have achieved world-class Net Promoter Scores (NPS) of 80+ from our customers.

There are many reasons why our team receives high levels of satisfaction from our customers, this includes our continued investment in people, innovation, automation, and our deep technical and security expertise. While everyone across our business plays a part in this score, our service desk – which troubleshoots and resolves issues for our customers every day – plays a central role.

As Brennan IT’s Service Desk Manager, it’s my role to ensure that our entire service desk team is providing the level of service and professionalism that our customers deserve. We make it our priority to provide the very best service, at every level, as well as to ensure continual and ongoing improvement.

That said, the life of a Service Desk Manager isn’t always straightforward. It’s a busy and fast-paced role, with several different areas of responsibility.

Here are just some of the things that a Brennan IT Service Desk Manager does on a typical day to deliver for our customers:

Resourcing for success

When a Brennan IT customer submits a ticket to our service desk or places a call, they know, with confidence, that it will be responded to promptly and professionally.

In part, this is due to some expert resourcing that’s done behind the scenes by our Service Desk Leads. Ensuring we have enough people to fulfill all our customers’ needs (both expected and unexpected) on any given day is vitally important.

It’s why we start every week with a well-researched plan for the days ahead. We collect several points of data from across the business, including from our sales pipeline, customer feedback, and individual employees’ availability and workload, to ensure our resourcing is optimal and effective.

When planning our resourcing, we have to ensure that we have people who can function backup resources in case of unforeseen circumstances, like if someone is sick or unavailable for any reason. This ensures we’re very rarely left short, and our customers are very rarely kept waiting.

As well as planning for the week ahead we also have a more general plan for the next few months based on our sales pipeline.

Upskilling, mentoring, and developing the team

To ensure that our people can deliver the best possible service, our Service Desk Leads are also very focused on providing the mentoring, training, and providing development opportunities they need.

This means identifying where the knowledge gaps exist and working out how to address these. At the end of the day, it’s about trying to improve resolution speed for our customers – so they can get back to work sooner. The more knowledge and skills they have, the faster and more easily they can resolve things for customers.

To this end, we have recently brought on a dedicated trainer who provides effective learning and development to our service desk professionals, as well as invested in a transition specialist so we can up-skill our team prior to a support contract commencing.

Continual customer service improvement

At Brennan IT, one of our key priorities is continual improvement. Simply meeting our customers’ needs isn’t good enough – we strive to always do better over time.

A recent HelpNet survey painted a sobering view of IT helpdesk support across multiple industries. According to this survey, 61% of respondents said IT downtime was an accepted norm in their organisations¹ and employees were losing an average of 28 minutes every time they had an IT-related problem². Also, employees said they were experiencing approximately two IT issues per week, which meant they were wasting nearly 50 hours a year.³

With an average Resolution Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 91% and an aspirational target of 100% resolution rate for first call requests, at Brennan IT, we do everything we can to ensure that our service levels are nowhere near this poor industry norm. This means always monitoring what’s happening across every customer account to identify patterns or opportunities for growth. It’s why we ask our customers to answer a brief survey every time we resolve an issue for them and then spend time analysing and collating the comments and scores every week.

Receiving positive feedback regarding our level of service is incredibly rewarding and one of the things I love about my role.

Responding directly to customers

As Service Desk Manager, I also spend some of my day meeting directly with customers to discuss their needs, any areas of concern, or any new support requirements they may have in the pipeline.

This is particularly the case when a customer is transitioning across to our help desk for the first time, or when they have recently commenced a new service contract for a specific piece of technology. As a business, we invest a great deal of time in ensuring that every member of our team is completely up to speed with the new solution and the scope of the contract, so that from day one of us providing service, everything runs smoothly.

Responding to unexpected events (hello, COVID-19)

While outcomes from our service desk are fairly predictable, we do also sometimes have to manage unexpected and unplanned challenges – like when there is a workload spike in a particular piece of technology or an unanticipated outage.

Minimising disruption for our customers is always our key priority.
For instance, as our service desk teams have had to work predominantly remote since COVID-19 landed on our shores back in 2020, we already had robust technology and systems in place to support our people, ensuring that our service delivery did not waiver, which meant we continued to provide our customers and their people the stability and confidence to go about their everyday.

We also have technology that provides us with very detailed insights regarding the performance of our team: who is taking calls, how they are resolved, what the actions are, and any customer feedback. This allows us to constantly identify opportunities for improvement across our remote workforces.

Importantly, our team also lives by our company values and are highly collaborative – if we need help solving an issue for a customer, we ask.

Lastly, no two days are ever the same here, for my team and I, we are constantly kept on our toes to ensure that we are delivering only the best outcomes to our customers.