Nowadays, technology has become a crucial part of almost every industry, and it directly affects the way people work. The appearance of computers and the Internet started to replace traditional paperwork and to connect people seamlessly. This has also applied in the finance industry. Unlike in the past, when all transactions were based on cash, today digital transactions have become the trend and lead to the importance of information technology. Because of that, the position of IT Service Desk was introduced also for finance companies to support end-users.
Normally, an IT Department for product-oriented company has two major divisions, Development and Operation. The work at Operation division requires a numerous amount of interwork between the functional team and Service Desk team’s goal is to handle that demand. The Service Desk team oversees supporting end-users, and the main goal is to assist the functional team to cooperate seamlessly. Besides that, by applying ITSM concept, the team follows best practices that have been researched and integrate it into the operations to deliver IT as a Service.
The Service Desk team acts as the frontline, handling a diverse array of tickets from across the company, including Service Requests, Incidents, Access Requests, and more. Whenever a new ticket arrives, the team needs to go through a process from classifying the information to prioritizing the ticket and to progressing it if the ticket is under team scope or assigning it to the functional team. After handling the ticket, it is resolved. Resolving the ticket includes the resolution that satisfies the demand of the end-user. Thanks to the ticketing system the flow of the ticket is to be manageable and can be easily adjusted whenever it needs to.
A Service Desk agent should be able to communicate with both IT users and non-IT users in a finance company, most of the people at the company being non-IT users. That is the reason why communication skills are essential for this position. Furthermore, a person who qualifies for this role must be able to deal with high pressure whenever an incident occurs, especially with so-called critical incidents that affect the whole business. Time-to-detection must be top priority in this kind of a situation, not just acting wisely to communicate with functional team to resolve the incident, but also by receiving many tickets and complaints from the field about the issue. During this time the Service Desk team plays a significant role in Operation division. After the incident is solved, service desk agents need to cooperate with the relevant team to find out the root cause and figure out the solution to prevent similar cases from happening in the future that seriously affect the income of the company.
In conclusion, the Service Desk plays an important role in Operation division that decides the efficiency of the firm. Some tasks of this position might change depending on the product of the company, but the overall activities remain the same. In the future, Artificial Intelligent may engage some tasks of Service Desk team, but it will never replace the appearance of the team that helps to connect customer to Operation division as human interaction.
This article is based on diary-based thesis, written by Tan Phan, supervised by Anna-Kaisa Saari. Thesis can be found from https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-202401151412
