Service Desk update: an interview with Sally Cox

In July, ASM launched its new Service Desk Portal as part of its service improvement plan.

We caught up with Sally Cox, Service Desk Manager at ASM, to find out how the launch went, and what customer experience has been like so far. She also shares some tips to getting the most out of the Service Desk.

Q: How did the launch back in July go?

Sally: The launch went very smoothly. The ASM Service Desk portal helps us to provide the help that our users need 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Users can track the progress of their own tickets and can access the ever-growing knowledge base for self-help. The Service Desk team had extensive training before go-live and were responsible for testing all aspects of the portal to ensure that it was fit for purpose and to ensure a smooth transition.

We were also fortunate enough to be able to include a number of end users in the final phases of acceptance testing which was very beneficial. 

Q: Can you update us on how the Service Desk has been going since the launch?

Sally: Things have been going very well! Customers are responding to using the Service Desk Portal.

Customer feedback continues to be very positive, and this is really great to hear as the whole purpose of launching the new portal was to improve customer service and customer satisfaction.

Something we are seeing our customers respond positively to is the improved visibility of their organisation’s tickets, which lets them keep track of the status of the incidents and service requests they have logged with us.

Integral to improving the service we offer is our internal dashboards. The dashboards visualise key information which helps us to ensure our high priority tickets are dealt with as a matter of urgency. The data collated on the dashboards allows us to monitor trends, which will support us in improving efficiency and provide an increased level of customer service.

Q: Any advice on how to best use the Service Desk Portal?

Sally: My top tip is when you are raising an incident, be as specific and detailed as possible. For example, in the subject line make it very clear what the problem you are reporting is – for example do not write something general like “import issue” but explain why you have the issue.

This will help our team categorise your query, and therefore address it in the most appropriate way quickly.

It’s a bit of a learning curve for some of our customers to identify how to put the most relevant information in first, but this will come with using the Service Desk Portal more frequently – and in the meantime we are here to support and advise.

Q: What are the most common queries you are seeing come through?

Sally: It’s hard to answer this, as the queries we see vary from day to day, and from customer to customer.

What we are seeing quite clearly are queries that are linked to trends and current events in our industry, for example at the moment the biggest things on Sequoia users’ minds are the migration from CHIEF to CDS for Exports, and the upcoming implementation of NCTS Phase 5.

So, we are seeing a spike in queries related to these changes as we draw closer to those deadlines.

We also see spikes when there is an external system outage, for example such as CDS or a CSP system. We introduced our Service Availability dashboard recently, which has proven extremely successful, but users obviously have more questions when an incident has occurred.

Q: What is next for the Service Desk?

Sally: We are working on updating the knowledge articles that are available, which means keeping track of what customers are asking, what they need from us, and incorporating that feedback to make the information they need the most, the most easily accessible.

We are also releasing more knowledge articles that align with the ASM Resource Centre, to make sure that any updates to our software are clearly communicated.

This is just phase one of our Service Desk improvement programme, where we aim to continually improve the service we offer to our users.

Using customer feedback and our own insight into how our team are performing, we will be able to streamline the customer experience further and help Sequoia users get the most out of the Service Desk Portal and Sequoia.

Ultimately it’s our aim to reintroduce a telephone service for high priority issues. We will update you further as our plans progress.

Thanks for all the details, Sally!