HD and CS

[mafatee7]

Hi all,

A large company has currently two points of contacts to the user/customers: HD (Help Desk) and CS (Customer Support). Each has some specific tasks. However, there are some conflicts between both and no clear ownership of incidents since each of them may forwrd some types of incidents to the other. They have then another line of support which has the expertise and more professional ppl.

I want to reconfigure the whole thing according to ITIL. I want to have a single point of contact. Merging both may not possible, shifting one of them to be in the SD and keeping the other to be in the 2nd line is also not flexible.

Can the professionals here advice me?

Regards,
Mafatee7

[jpgilles]

[dboylan]

Mafatee7,

To follow the guidance of the ITIL framework requires that End Users requesting help and assistance have one point of contact. One phone number, one email address, one fax number. Anything else is straying from Best Practices.

The issues you are encountering are the very reasons that ITIL was developed. Organizations tried splitting out the "Call this number if you are having issues with the sales application, and call this number if you are having issues with etc, etc" and found that it leads to issues of ownership on the part of IT and confusion on the part of the users.

That one point of contact may be a single number that prompts the user to press 1 if the issue is related to a broken device or 2 if your account is locked. But to the user's perspective, there must only be one point of entry for accessing the break fix (Incident) or guidance (Service Request) aspects of IT. You might still have issues of ownership within IT, but it would probably help lessen the confusion on the part of the user.

Even in the above situation, there still needs to be one email address or fax number for the users to contact. The group that controls that email address or fax number becomes the de facto Single Point of Contact.

Don

[mafatee7]

Hi all,
Ok, after reading the replies, I have the following thoughts:

Customers will have a single point of contact (single tel./extension/e-mail/fax ...etc)

I'll shift the HD to be mainly responsible for the SD. They will continue to perform their old tasks as well as the initial support

The CS will be like "first & half" line support, i.e., whenever the SD (prev.HD) can't solve the issue or receive an issue that would normally be one the CS's tasks, the SD will fwd it to the CS

2nd support line will be the other more specialized groups, and 3rd line will be vendors

One thing here to note, is that I need to reconfigure/unify existing processes so that it conforms to ITIL.

Any comments??