by Natalie Topouzian

As the Service Desk Manager at UXC Connect I often get asked to explain exactly what differentiates my service desk from any other.
Before I reveal the answer, let me tell you a little about my team.

The Managed Service Desk is part of UXC Connect’s Enterprise Delivery Centre. The analysts are a mixed bunch: some are quiet achievers, some are extroverts, and some are even pranksters. On a standard day they will answer between 200-300 phone calls and action about 150-200 emails. While they relax and share a laugh between the calls they will also be working on individual continuous service improvement projects or finishing off that last bit of training. On a very quiet day you might even get caught in the middle of a miniature office Nerf gun war.

However, when an urgent issue impacts our customer environment, that’s when I really see my team shine. Because they give more than anyone could expect when it’s needed most. This is exactly what can be said about a day in June 2011.

At around 6.30am calls started flooding in from a customer saying that applications and the network were unavailable. It was crazy; we were hit with over 250 calls by 9am.

In addition to handling high priority calls, the senior service desk analysts focused all their attention on answering calls and providing fast effective answers to the lesser trained analysts. They quickly escalated any major issues to myself and jumped right back to work. Their diligence and dedication creating fantastic examples for the others to follow.

All my junior analysts did their very best: logging tickets quickly and answering the next call. It wasn't uncommon that day to see twenty or more instances of our ticketing system open on their machines as we put their multi-tasking skills to the test.

We also had great support from other teams within the business. The Remote Desktop Team put in their best efforts to assist us by logging as many of the emails they could from the Service Desk queue to try and lighten our load. This was not asked of them but they could see a fellow team struggling and took on extra work to try and help.

Ultimately, the analysts were faced with 1000 inbound calls during business hours alone. Or in other words, 1000 calls in 12 hours across 8 analysts. This was an amazing achievement for the team.

So, what is it that makes my Service Desk different from any other?

Our Culture promotes that when it’s work time we all work really hard to support our customer but when it’s time to relax we can all smile and share a laugh together. That culture is what makes us different from any other Service Desk. The force with which upper management endorses that culture and empowers its managers and team leaders to drive it creates the team dynamic that makes UXC Connect so different. Everyone strives to meet their SLA's not because it is their job but because they really want too for themselves and for the team.

We doubled the all time record for our Service Desk that day and the icing on the cake was that we only received positive feedback on our performance.