The IT demands of the business are increasing with time. You need the latest technologies for supporting your daily business operations. The importance of an efficient and functional help desk can’t be overstated. IT help desks can use ticketing software for providing swift and excellent assistance to your end-users. This will ensure that your IT operations will run smoothly. These roles are very important for your business as they will help you in maintaining efficient workflows. Organizations should know about the best IT help desk practices that they can follow for improving their help desk. In this article, we are going to talk about the best IT help desk practices for your business.
What is a good IT help desk?
A good IT help desk will help you in providing a good customer experience. The help desk will offer solutions to your end-users who need IT support. They will also help your employees if they are seeking answers to any IT questions. This is very important for your business as everyone is using IT for conducting daily operations. If your employees are stuck due to an IT issue, then they can’t do their work. Thus, it is important to ensure that you can quickly resolve your employee queries.
Best IT Help Desk Practices
Your IT help desk will help you in driving your business success. However, your business will be limited by how well your IT help desk is functioning. You should implement the best IT help desk practices for ensuring that you are providing the best services to your end-users and employees.
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Use good help desk software
You should use the software that is designed for help desks only. This software has all the necessary tools to your team can use for fulfilling IT requests. There are various help desk tools available in the market. You should look for help desk solutions that are easy to use and set up. They should provide an integrated set of tools that you can use for reducing the remediation time. Your IT help desk team can use these tools for solving end-user issues.
You should understand your business needs. This will help you in finding the right help desk software for your business. You should ensure that this tool will help you in automating processes.
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Start with your existing processes
Most businesses start building their help desk infrastructure from scratch. They forget about their existing processes. If you are re-building your infrastructure, then you need to retrain your service team. They need to learn about new procedures. You will waste a lot of resources and time in re-training your employees.
This will also confuse your end-users who are already using the old system. It is always a better idea to integrate help desk software with your old IT infrastructure. You can use this software for simplifying and streamlining current processes.
Try to integrate the new help desk management software with your existing processes. You don’t need to worry about re-training your help desk agents. Your customers will also be comfortable with old processes.
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Grow iteratively
Gigantic changes won’t work if you are upgrading your help desk service. Try to make small improvements in your help desk system. This will help you in improving your help desk services with time. A business that makes gigantic changes is most likely to crash as the organizations can’t handle such big changes. You should start with smaller projects. Your help desk agents should work on making these small improvements. This will lead to the iterative growth of your business.
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Hire skilled technicians
Skilled technicians can quickly solve any IT issue. This will ensure that your help desk services can provide good services to your end-users. If your lower-tier technicians are escalating every issue to top-tier technicians, then your top-tier technicians will waste a lot of their time and resources.
Sometimes it can be expensive to hire knowledgeable technicians. You can solve this problem by creating documentation for your technicians. They can follow this documentation for solving common issues. You should focus on providing regular training to your employees. Organizations can also partner up with good MSPs like Bleuwire. Bleuwire will give you access to the best IT experts. They will help you to quickly solve every IT issue. This will free up your IT team and they can focus on doing high-value projects.
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Knowledge base
You should create a knowledge base for your technicians. This knowledge base should contain all the steps for troubleshooting and how-to. It should contain the answer to all the common questions. Your IT help desk can follow this documentation for solving common issues. Make sure that all this information is available in a central location. This will ensure that your IT technicians can easily access this information.
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Create new tickets for every customer query or interaction
Customers are the most important part of every business. Every customer interaction is important for your business. You should create a new ticket whenever you are interacting with your customers.
This will help your business in tracking all the open cases. It will ensure that your users are updated with the ticket status. A record of complaints should be kept for every user. This will help your business in providing personalized and proactive customer support. Make sure that you are creating a ticket for every in-person online request, call alert, social media message, message, and conversation. This will help you in providing better services to your customers.
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Offer high value to your customers
It is important to provide value to your customers. This will help you in increasing your customer retention rate. Every business should focus on providing optimal value to its customers.
The main aim of your support interaction is not to just solve a particular issue. Make sure that your support agents are having deep conversations with your end-users and customers. They should understand what challenges your end-users are facing. They can share self-help articles with your customers. Your agents can also guide the customers in solving their problems. A deep conversation with your customers will help you in ensuring that your customers will be satisfied with your help desk support.
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Implement effective Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
SLAs are documents that will help you in defining what services your IT help desk will provide. This document should include the metrics that you will use for tracking your help desk performance.
SLAs act as a contract between the customers and the help desk. This agreement will help you in clearing the expectations with your customers. It will help you in avoiding misunderstandings in the future. SLAs are generally applicable to MSPs. However, they will also help you in setting expectations and metrics for internal IT teams.
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Automate your ticketing processes
Automated ticketing will help you in creating and assigning tickets to the agents. The tickets will be assigned according to the experience and knowledge level of your agents. This software will ensure that you don’t need to figure out the type of every ticket. You also don’t need to worry about whom to contact. Automation of the entire process will help you in cutting down on unnecessary costs and wasted time.
Automation will help your help desk automatically detect issues. You can use these tools to automatically create tickets and fix the issues. This type of automation will help you in solving common IT help desk requests. You can resolve these requests by following the same solution. If you are automating these tickets, then it will help your IT team in saving a lot of time and resources. They can focus on solving tickets that require manual remediation.
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Focus on transparency
You should offer transparency to your customers. Your customers should know about the status of their requests. They should know about the systems and processes that you are using for resolving their requests. This will ensure that they will have more trust in your organization. A transparent process will help you in growing your customer base. It will convert your customer base into a loyal customer base.
All the businesses that are famous for their customer service facilitate good communication between IT support representatives and customers. It is important to focus on transparency if you want to increase your customer base. You can automate the ticket updates for improving transparency. This will ensure that your customers will stay updated. Customers will know exactly what you are doing with their tickets. This will help you in saving your agents time. Also, it will reduce emails from your customers as they don’t need to manually ask for updates.
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Add context to every ticket
Some of the most common help desk requests will look something like this: “Please help my laptop or computer is not working properly”. This won’t help your IT help desk in understanding anything. Maybe their internet is slow or they have lost some data. It is impossible to predict what your user is facing.
It is important to ask for context in every ticket. This will help your IT help desk team in finding the root cause of the issue. They can quickly solve the problem. The context will help your IT team quickly solve the issue. It will help them in supporting the smooth operation of your devices. Your customers will also stay satisfied with your services. Fixing these issues quickly will help you in increasing the productivity of your employees.
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Track your help desk metrics
It is important to track your help desk metrics. This will ensure that you have an overall view of how your help desk is performing. It will act as a visual for you. You can follow it to check if you need to make improvements to your services. This will help you in measuring the progress of your help desk.
You can track metrics like resolution time, customer satisfaction, tickets resolved, response time, and resolution rate. It is important to set a baseline for these metrics. This will ensure that you are always improving your help desk services.
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Always improve the process
This is the final practice that your IT help desk should follow. Always look for ways to improve your IT help desk service. The difference between a good and excellent help desk is that an excellent help desk is always improving its processes.
You should always look at your help desk metrics for measuring your progress. This will help you in finding areas where you can improve your process. You should also check how your users are feeling about your IT help desk. If your customers are not satisfied, then you should collect feedback from them. This feedback will help you in improving your processes.
Conclusion
These are the best IT help desk practices that you can follow for upgrading your IT help desk. You should spend your team understanding and implementing these help desk procedures. These are the best help desk practices that every business should try to implement. You can execute some of these practices for optimizing your help desk management. However, it is expensive to maintain an in-house help desk team. You need to hire expert IT professionals for your business. This can be very expensive as IT professionals generally take 80-200k$ annually. You also need to spend money on expensive software and tools.
Most businesses are moving towards SMBs for solving this problem. Experienced MSPs like Bleuwire will help you in handling your help desk request. They will give you access to the best IT talent and software. Bleuwire will help you in resolving your customer and employee tickets. You don’t need to worry about solving these tickets manually. This will remove the burden from your IT team as they don’t need to worry about solving these requests. Your IT team can spend their time and resources on improving your core products and services. If you need more information regarding IT help desk services, then you can contact Bleuwire.
Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™ services and solutions in how we can help your business.
