IT Zoom, Germany: Cognizant’s Global Head of Markets for Infrastructure Services Highlights the Need for New Ways of Thinking to Move From a Traditional IT Helpdesk Towards a Unified Experience Desk

“One of the biggest challenges for traditional IT helpdesks is to evolve from a cost center to a value center. This is possible by creating a good, overall experience around the support received,” says Venu Lambu. “What’s more, the levels of digitization throughout businesses are increasing. Today, both organizations and their customers consume services on mobile apps, and use virtual assistants on portals and social platforms.” Excerpts:

“As the Internet of Things (IoT) evolves across digital business ecosystems, it becomes critical to train support resources on digital devices, platforms and applications. This is how companies are now differentiating themselves to stay ahead of the competition.

The Unified Experience Desk (UXD) addresses the digital shift. It focuses on multi-skilled, multi-role playing resources and the deployment of voice and text-based virtual assistants, robotic process automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Many large enterprises have invested heavily in both internal IT helpdesks and end-customer facing helpdesks for areas such as human resources, technology, and product partners. This is now going through a change.

When it comes to human resources, the focus will be on right skilling and multi-skilling. At locations with onsite IT helpdesk staff, there will be a mix of far-shoring, near- and on-shoring professionals. When it comes to technology, it is important to strike the right balance between proprietary products and third-party solutions.

The most important change will be convergence and use of resources between internal user desks and external customer support desks that will collaborate more closely with each other.

Creating a Unified Experience Desk is a big change from the traditional IT helpdesk. Enterprises trying to do this on their own can end up spending significant amounts of time on building such a model as it requires a change in mindset, evaluation of new tools, building an automation repository, acquiring  new talent and skills, and driving organizational change management to integrate the support models.

The service desk of tomorrow moves from merely being a technical helpdesk to becoming one that understands the business context, acts accordingly and moves away from the idea of ‘ticket ownership’ to service-centric and business-aligned metrics. Overall, this significantly contributes to workplace satisfaction.”

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