State of the Service Desk 6: Shift Left

A major topic that was discussed in almost all the interviews was "Shift Left".

In essence, shift left is a service desk strategy for liberating knowledge, tools and automation from Level 3 and Level 2, and making them available to Level 1 agents and ultimately to the customer.

Image Source: Service Desk Institute

This has the following effects:

• Lower time to resolve service requests and incidents, which leads to improved customer satisfaction
• Reduction in load on the service desk
• Reduction in cost
• Liberation of highly skilled resources to do project work

Shift Left was seen as an imperative response to the pressures of increased demand on the service desk without proportionally more resources. It is being addressed by three means:

• Automation and Orchestration
• Knowledge Management
• People Management

These means are discussed in subsequent sections.

‍Next - Part 7: Automation and Orchestration In late 2020 servicely.ai conducted 23 research interviews with service desk executives, managers and practitioners, to explore the State of the Service Desk in the post-COVID19world.The interview results were synthesised into a report that covers the following topics:

1. Executive Summary
2. Introduction
3. Service Desk Metrics
4. Increase in Demand
5. Transformation, Consolidation and Integration
6. Shift Left
7. Automation and Orchestration
8. Knowledge Management
9. People Management
10. Support Channels
11. Data Quality
12. Tools
13. Conclusion

This blog series will serialise the topics listed above.