Notifications to Customers from the Service Desk

[tolman101]

Hello all,

I am responsible for the Service Desk at our organisation. We have around 5000 users in the Americas that we support. I am often asked by the business to distribute information to the user base from our Service Desk, and I seem to find myself trying to figure out if we should or shouldn't be doing as requested.

Does anyone know of ITIL's stance on what the Service Desk should be responsible for in terms of distribution of information to the business? At the moment I am pondering a request to send out information on how to reset an intranet password (screenshots etc).

Any help the forum can be will be appreciated.

thanks, Matt

[itilimp]

I don't believe ITIL is prescriptive in terms of the content of or type of communications.

However, the Service Desk IS intended to be the central point of contact for end users for the services they receive from ICT.

My personal view is that it is the role of the Service Desk operator to enable the end users as well as process incidents and change requests.

Service Desk Operators should be partly responsible for maintaining FAQs on intranets, handouts, knowledge bases, etc.

In this instance I wouldn't necessarily send out a blanket e-mail to all users, especially if they don't all have access to the intranet. Are only certain people given passwords for restricted areas? In which case I'd e-mail them first and see what feedback comes through.

You may want to write the document up with screenies etc, and any request that come through you e-mail the document so they can solve it themselves in future.

If this request came through at our place it would be viewed as perfectly reasonable. In fact we encourage all communications to go through the Help Desk, presenting that central customer-focussed contact point.

Hope that's of use to you, even if it isn't ITIL.

[rjp]

Exactly as the 'IMP' says,

First point of contact - really the service desk should be where the rest of IT go to contact the users.

The benefits are numerous (of course if you are pressed for resources this will look like extra cost to you as the SD manager. But remember value isn't just lower cost its also increased benefits.)

Particularly staff satisfaction: Normally they have to deal with impact of what's others send out. By being the channel through wich info flows out, they are given a sense of control, are informed, and able to flag end-user issues that the 'authors' may not have spotted.

And so much more.

[matrejekm]

Service Desk role is also to educate users.

I work in Change Management and use Service Desk to contact end users
when they are going to be affected by Changes.

If we introduce/upgrade a piece of software -> Service Desk is to pass information from Future Schedule of Changes to users.
If needed - Service Desk also sends manuals or links to them and provide answers to user questions (most of them are calming users down - they daily operations won't be hurt).
If software rollout is divided into batches Service Desk also provides information of date scheduled for certain user.

I consider Service Desk as the only point of contact for users (ideally). Well skilled Service Desk prevents from contacting 2nd line directly with end users.