Coronavirus pandemic has forced businesses to include better work arrangements. Companies are now embracing remote and hybrid work. Hybrid work simply means that you have employees who are in-office and remote. Your employees will work in a blended schedule. The hybrid structure will provide a better work-life balance to your employees. You can still have face-to-face meetings with your employees. Thus, remote and hybrid working is perfect for businesses. However, remote working comes with the need for better and adaptable technology.

ITSM can help you in supporting a remote and hybrid workforce. In this article, we are going to share some tips that will help you in navigating a remote workforce in ITSM.

Challenges that come with hybrid and remote work

Remote work can help you in increasing the productivity of your employees. However, these benefits also come with a lot of challenges.

You need to provide mobile equipment like mobile phones to your remote workers. Make sure that you can provide troubleshooting in case of some errors. Your employees will be accessing your network remotely. This will eat up your IT help desk agent time.

Your team may be spread in different time zones and regions. The time difference will give rise to communication issues. Also, remote workers might not follow the strict 9-5 routine. They might need support at hours when your support team is not working. Due to this, your remote workers might need to wait for days before their tickets get resolved.

Your support desk employees will also face a lot of new challenges. Remote work can provide them a better and flexible schedule. However, your remote support team won’t know who needs to handle which task. If your team was using a whiteboard, then they won’t have access to it. Thus, you need to ensure that you can deal with these challenges.

Best practices for navigating a remote workforce in ITSM

You can follow these practices for dealing with challenges associated with remote work:

Increase visibility

You should ensure that your business has a clear IT service desk. This will ensure that your customers can communicate with your business. Many companies stop at this step. It is also important to increase the visibility of your IT support desk.

You can use multiple methods for increasing the visibility of your support desk. First, you should send a newsletter to your customers. This will help you in raising awareness about your service desk. You can also offer support on your website to your customers. Some companies are also providing white-glove support to their customers. They are proactively checking up with their customers and making sure that everything is working properly.

Knowledge hub

You need to provide knowledge and information to your remote workers. Self-service can help you in reducing the tickets. However, you need to use knowledge management software for solving this problem. You should store all the information in one centralized knowledge hub. This knowledge hub will contain all the information that your employees and users need. Thus, it will be accessible to everyone.

Many companies will store long wiki articles in their knowledge hub. However, this won’t help your customers and employees. You should store small bits of information, infographic, and videos.

Establish clear queues

Most companies were using a whiteboard to keep track of the queues and tickets. However, this is not going to help you now.

You should work on creating clear queues and instructions for tasks that need to be completed. After that, you need to assign employees to these tasks. You can use cloud-based ITSM for solving this problem.

Automation

If you want to improve your service desk efficiency, then you should use the power of automation. You can use AITSM for solving your requests and tasks. This is very important in a hybrid environment. The workload is increasing due to the remote employees. AITSM will help you in reducing your tasks and increasing the efficiency of your employees.

Use real-time collaboration techniques

The best way to reduce your tickets is by collaborating in real-time to resolve these tickets. However, it is not easy to make this happen. You can use the collaborative features provided by ITSM tools for solving this problem.

These collaborative features will help you in easing the strain. For example, if some agent is working on a ticket then they can leave a note on the ticket. They can also start a discussion with other members.

Your IT service desk agents can use tools like Zoom and Skype for collaborating with each other. This will help your team in solving the bigger incidents.

You should also collaborate with your customers. Make sure that everything is working properly.

Use a virtual agent

Your team can’t provide 24/7 manual support to your employees. You can solve this problem by using a virtual agent.

A virtual agent is just a virtual character that will use AI to solve your customer queries. It will have intelligent conversations with your users. Your virtual agent will automatically respond to your customer’s queries. Thus, you don’t need to worry about providing manual support to your customers.

In simple words, a chatbot or virtual agent will be armed with knowledge. It will share information with your customers. Chatbots will use the available information for solving your customers. If the chatbot can’t solve your customer’s problems, then it will send the ticket to your support team. This will ensure that your support team will only work on serious tickets.

Conclusion

You need a good service desk for dealing with a hybrid workforce. Organizations should embrace new technology if they want to deal with challenges that come with a remote workforce. A remote workforce can help you in saving a lot of costs. It can also help you in increasing the productivity of your organization. If you want to solve the issues related to ITSM or the remote workforce, then you can contact Bleuwire. Bleuwire can help you in solving your IT support issues. They can provide IT support to your employees and customers. Thus, you don’t need to worry about hiring your own IT support team. If you need more information regarding IT services, then you can contact Bleuwire.

Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™ services and solutions in how we can help your business.