How long has your organization offered its employees IT support? For as long as you can remember, I’d bet. After all, few organizations can cope without some form of IT support – whether formal or informal. Without it, business operations would struggle. Especially given the ever-increasing business reliance on technology to deliver products and services. IT support is often a critical corporate capability. But have you ever stopped to think about the name “IT support” and how it might be limiting the effectiveness of your IT service desk?
IT support is, and has always been, about helping people to do their work using technology. However, and especially in these days of an increased focus on employee experience (we call it IT experience management (ITXM)), there are benefits to a mindset change from “IT support” to “people support.” It’s important to recognize that IT support is fundamentally about supporting people, not just technology.
What’s in a name?
The premise of this blog is that the name “IT support” has encouraged an IT-centric approach to corporate IT service and support capabilities and continues to do so.
Think about how your IT service desk agents describe their role. Do they say they deliver IT support or that they help people to be productive again? I’d be willing to bet that many will state the former, not the latter (and despite any change in support focus).
The term “IT support” was born in the time of traditional IT management approaches, when technology was managed as separate technology domains rather than the delivery of consumable services. Things have changed significantly since then. First, there was ITIL and its IT service management (ITSM) best practices.
More recently, organizations have realized that IT service desks are about people enablement, perhaps aligned with the growing interest in and adoption of experience management practices. We’ve also seen greater use of terms such as “human-centric IT.” So is it time to unshackle our IT service desk agents from the term “IT support”?
The human element in IT support
IT service desks have always been about people helping people. Even with the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI)-based IT support capabilities, it’s still a case of people helping people, and people and technology helping people (plus people now helping technology).
In support of this, IT service desks are increasingly trying to understand end users’ needs, frustrations, and expectations. Empathy is deemed a critical skill for IT service desk agents, with it acknowledged to improve the IT support experience. There’s also talk about the need to build trust and rapport with end users by providing consistent and reliable IT support services.
What started as the support of technology is now very much about the support of people (despite the IT support name).
IT support increasingly requires appropriate people skills
This move to human-centric IT can also be seen in the skills needed by service desk agents. In addition to knowing about specific technologies and perhaps using the employed ITSM tool and other support technologies such as remote control, adverts for service desk agent roles are likely to include people skills such as the aforementioned empathy and:
- Communication skills, with the requirement to clearly and effectively communicate with non-technical end-users.
- Patience, to allow the end-user to fully explain their issue(s) before jumping into solution mode.
- Active listening skills, to ensure that the end-user’s’ real issue is understood and correctly addressed.
- User expectation management, as an extension of the required communication skills.
- A commitment to providing superior IT support experiences.
These and other people skills are considered important to better enable end-user productivity through quicker resolutions, improve the service experience, and better support remote and hybrid workforces. Many IT service desks are following the trend for human-centric IT, but we still call what they do IT support!
What can we do about that name?
The realistic answer is probably “Not much.” As with the issues around the name “enterprise service management” and what’s done in reality, the name is unlikely to change. We’ve all been involved with IT support for too long for it to change name now (plus, for some organizations it will always be IT-focused support).
However, what we can do is start to talk about the IT service desk providing people support under the banner of IT support. Referencing the shift focus from technology-centric to service-centric to people-centric support.
The move from focusing on technical expertise to a more balanced approach that includes customer service skills isn’t enough here. There needs to be more than a role-based approach to change. For example, IT support personnel need to think more about the business impact of the end-user issues they handle. These might be business issues rather than simply IT issues. Plus, what about IT support success? The number of quickly closed tickets to meet a service level target again likely misses the importance of getting people working again, as the focus is on the metric, not the affected end-user’s productivity.
Ultimately, anyone involved in IT support needs to appreciate that an end-user employee being unable to work is more important than their technology not working. We really need to be focused on people support, not IT support (even if we can’t change the name).
Going forward, let’s talk about people support more
In terms of the name, I’ve no doubt that IT teams will still want to buy IT support tools, not people support tools. However, to really bring about the cultural change required for experience-focused improvements, there’s a need to refocus IT support from technology to people at a strategy and policy level, with ITXM playing a key role in understanding the current state and where productivity and experience improvements lie.
I think the IT industry already knows that effective IT support is really about supporting people, not just fixing technology. It just needs to start the necessary changes to make it an operational reality.
To learn more about ITXM, take a look at the overview of the framework here.
