When recruiting service desk staff, which capability set should be prioritised?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 7. Seven ITIL practices in detail medium
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How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Not correct Statistical analysis skills for identifying trends in service performance data
Wrong. Analysis of trends supports continual improvement and problem management. Useful adjacent skills, but not what the desk role is primarily built on.
Not correct Deep specialist technical expertise in every technology the organisation runs
Wrong. Desk staff need practical technical understanding, but deep specialism sits with support teams. Hiring for depth alone tends to produce a desk that diagnoses well and communicates badly.
Not correct Contract and commercial negotiation skills for dealing with suppliers
Wrong. That capability belongs with supplier management. The desk may raise supplier-related issues, but it does not negotiate the relationships.
Correct Empathy, communication and emotional intelligence, combined with understanding of the business the users work in
Correct. ITIL emphasises excellent customer service skills and business understanding, because the desk's job is to understand and reassure the user as much as to record the ticket.
Why
The service desk is where most users form their impression of the service provider, so its staff are selected for customer-facing capability: empathy, incident analysis and prioritisation, effective communication, emotional intelligence, and enough business awareness to understand what the user's problem is actually costing them. Deep technical specialism is the province of the support teams the desk escalates to.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- ITIL 4 syllabus clause 7
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 7 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
- Which statement best describes what the incident management practice is intended to achieve? machine-checked
- How is an incident defined in ITIL? machine-checked
- Several incidents are open at once and the support team must decide which to work on first. On what basis should the order be decided? machine-checked
- A difficult incident is worked on by pulling several specialists from different teams into the same session at the same time; once it becomes clear who is best placed to continue, the others step away. What is this technique called? machine-checked
- Why does an organisation define a separate procedure for major incidents rather than handling them exactly like all other incidents? machine-checked
- A support team routinely fixes incidents by phone and updates the incident record only with the word 'fixed'. What is the most significant consequence of this? machine-checked