Mark Jacot

A great evening last night featuring a BBQ (it can be warm and sunny up north) followed by Family Fortunes with some amazing answers to what a Service Desk does all day from Edge Hill and other universities. I believe a good evening followed in the bar. I can’t report on that as I chose to save myself for tonight and have an early night. However, a few people were quieter today than yesterday!

Day 2 kicked off with a slot from Lorraine Brown from St. Andrews. Some great ideas in here about using the Service Desk Institute to assess service provision and drive improvements. Something I am going to think about, watch out for an objective this year James. The presentation showed the benefit of a structured approach to improvement with benchmarking. Will follow this up as we are on that journey too.

We then had a slot on business relationship management which sort of confirmed what we are doing is the right stuff and works.

This was followed by an interactive panel session on successful business relationships. It’s all about empathy and working with rather than talking down to people. It’s not just about metrics and measures. I personally got some good insight into the challenges and approaches to support the different constituent groups we look after – Students, researchers, academics and administrative staff, in particular around how to run conversations and engagement. Of course many of our customers fulfil more than one role, so it’s important not to be too inflexible.

Went on to a really good discussion session on metrics. We all agreed if we could only have three metrics they would be
a. A single question on each ticket to determine if the Customer was totally satisfied
b. Measure of key incidents, and
c. Performance on key channels inc telephony call handling, twitter response, online response etc.

After a chat over lunch including whether there were metrics available about using smartphones on the toilet (hold that thought), Rhys Davies shared his journey as CIO at Leeds. Calm and thought provoking presentation with lots of content. His brief was deliver change and transformation and don’t upset anyone, I wonder if that is possible. He had a good balanced approach focused on people, service, change delivery and a clear simple process for delivering change. They are doing a research data management project which sounds of interest too.

We then had a great session on gamification. Apart from the normal stuff, the presentation discussed the use of the smartphones on the toilet, and both the physiological and technical risks. The NHS apparently is doing research on acute kidney injuries from sitting too long in one place! The stat behind this. 69% of Londoners use their iPhone on the toilet. So this is important!! I wonder if android usage is higher or lower. I also learnt about Generation x, y and c. C is the generation that can’t live without being connected all the time – Google Booz & Allen. Some really good ideas generated as a result.

Cardiff gave us an oversight on use of interactive chat effectively, followed by a slot from Northampton looking at the concept fit for purpose, fit for use and value provided.

Finally for today we are trying to persuade twitter newbie Lindsey Barry @lindseybarry82 to do her first tweet which she did during the conference dinner #selfie