We’re bombarded with growth figures and press coverage hyping the importance of social media, but can under-resourced service desks justify the time needed to participate? Frieda Morton-Evans looks at the potential of online communities to transform the delivery of IT services and help IT departments get closer to the customers they are supporting. 

Not long ago, it was enough to have a website, now businesses are being challenged to build a web presence to engage with customers in an informal setting. The dominance (and sometimes negative connotations) of Twitter and Facebook mean that many people are overlooking the potential value of social media, with other less popular but highly useful business-related services are often ignored (I will be highlighting some of these service later – here is a useful high level look at the social media landscape to reference).

Many businesses are beginning to understand the importance of social media as part of their overall IT strategy and this leads onto opportunities for using social media for user support.  There is a need to balance providing a cost-effective service desk with an increasing demand from users to provide “real time” support of IT services, and potentially, social media is a powerful way to meet this dual aim.

It is widely predicted that in the future social media will change the role of the traditional service desk, but which services are suited to and can be enhanced by the medium? Here are some examples:

- Customer service/feedback opportunities
- Customer and user communication
- Customer support
- Knowledge management
- IT interdepartmental collaboration with the service desk

Correct use of social media can enable “social support”, which allows the service desk to help customers obtain service more efficiently while offering an opportunity to increase their knowledge by sharing ideas and solutions to common problems.  This encourages users to carry out more self help activities, to become more independent and to try remedial actions that other customers have used to successfully resolve issues.  Doing this successfully can reduce costs while offering customers immediate access to support.

There are also opportunities to use online communities to gather feedback and collaborate with users to improve or build new IT services.  This contributes to the underpinning principles of improving organisational capabilities and helping support continual service improvement and can be a powerful way of addressing the IT/business alignment issue.

There are already numerous examples of social media being used by service desks:

- Twitter is being used for communication of incidents, alerts, and maintenance being undertaking that can affect customers.
- The ability of Facebook to connect with customers in an environment where they are comfortable lends itself to soliciting honest feedback and establishing a collaborative relationship within the organisation.
- YouTube can deliver just-in-time training via video tutorials; a model of support growing in popularity.

Here are some other areas where social media can help within the service desk/IT organisation:

- Knowledge management – blogs, wiki’s
- Self help instructions and FAQs – blogs, wiki’s, YouTube
- Incident capture and incident reporting – Twitter, Facebook posts
- Change management including the forward schedule of change – Twitter, Facebook posts
- Information dissemination – Facebook Wall, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook events
- Problem solving/forums/community groups – Facebook, Yammer, Twitter
- Training/how tos and eLearning – YouTube, Flixr, Podcasts, Vimeo
- Internal IT communications – Facebook, Twitter
- IT tips of the day – Facebook and Twitter
- Contact information and reminders – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
- Self promotion, including service desk and support statistics, and new services – Facebook, Twitter, blogs
- Early life support – Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube, podcasts
- Notifications of major incidents and severe outages – Facebook, Twitter, blogs

There are many challenges ahead for service desks as they consider the impact of social media and how this fits with the implementation and management specific ITIL processes. While investigating the use of social media, service desks must address the following challenges:

- Social media etiquette and policy. Who will be the social media ‘voice’ of the service desk, what tone should they adopt and what information should be shared online?
- How can we resource social support actively and effectively?
- Integration of social media activity into the current IT service offerings.
- Monitoring and managing the IT service reputation online, including how to handle negative feedback.
- Security – to ensure that all potential risks are identified, managed and monitored.

Finally, it is important to remember that whatever the future of service desk when incorporating social media, the commitment must always be to provide consistent quality service to customers.

Frieda is a director at ServiceSymmetry.

Contact her on Twitter @itilgoddess