The term “virtualization” has been widely used by the IT industry and therefore maybe confusing to start with. Here let me specify what “virtualization” means to the Service Desk.
Virtual Service Desk Agents/Teams may mean the Service Desk is a virtual team of agents or teams who maybe working out of different physical locations, different countries and different time zones. This is a trend for global corporations that need to provide round the clock (7x24) Service Desk and/or multi-lingual support. In the case of round the clock, the term “follow the sun” is also common for shifting between virtual Service Desks strategically around the world so at any time during 24 hours one of the 3 or 4 Service Desks is in their day-time. Here the term “Virtual Service Desk” is at its fullest capacity because the end user need not know which Service Desk around the world is handling the call, as long as the service is available and the language their demand is available via the virtual Service Desk hotline.
The above scenario is a Virtual Service Desk made up of multiple teams, now consider the other scenario where a single team providing Service Desk service to multiple companies. As I mentioned earlier in this article, the “in house” Service Desk suffers mostly due to the high cost of facilities needed in a Service Desk, the phone system, the call management system, the service management tools. If a well equipped Service Desk team can be shared amongst companies, these facilities and their costs can be shared. If the team has the right “Service Infrastructure”, it can provide “Virtual Service Desk” service by switching quickly between the customers and therefore shared by customers. In fact, such Virtual Service Desk can reduce wastage compare to dedicated model, where workload fluctuates and agents are mostly overload or underutilized.
