IT support is one of the most important critical functions for businesses. According to a report from Network computing, midsize companies can lose up to $1 million per year due to IT downtime. Businesses are spending more than $157 billion on IT services every year. This shows the importance of IT support.

IT helpdesk will generally use a ticketing system for managing requests. Even a well-managed IT support team finds it difficult to deliver timely resolutions. SLAs are increasing the performance targets of the IT support team. Thus, the support staffs are always looking for some methods to improve their efficiency. Businesses are trying to save their money.

IT support teams should try to reduce their IT support tickets. This will help your support team in saving a lot of time and money. In this article, we are going to share some tips that will help you in reducing and prioritizing your IT support tickets.

Categorize your IT support tickets

Many smaller IT support teams use FIFO or “first-in, first-out” orders for managing tickets. If you are responding to tickets in sequential order, then it will ensure that you are treating all the support requests equally. This will help you in following your SLA contracts. However, this will also lead to a huge response backlog. If your team is dealing with a lot of support tickets, then FIFO orders won’t help you.

You can follow the ITIL best practices for prioritizing your tickets and incidents. According to the ITIL best practices, you should prioritize the tickets according to the impact on the business and the urgency. If some ticket is very important and urgent, then you should solve it first.

Your help desk should use these factors for determining the priority of tickets:

Affected services.
Reason for the incident.
How quickly you can solve the problem.
The number of affected users and applications.
Nature of the incident.

You should assess these factors for establishing the priority of your tickets. For example, a network outage can have a huge impact on your business. It will affect most of the users that are connected with the platform. This problem is serious when you compare it with simple problems like having a problem on an individual laptop. Thus, you should assign the first problem to your core team. The resolution time of the first problem should be fixed to 30 minutes. The latter issue should have a resolution time of 24 hours.

This model will help your team in focusing on the important issues. It will ensure that your team is working on the tickets that have less amount of resolution time. Thus, it will help you in the better allocation of resources.

Self-service portals

If your users are experiencing some technical issue, then they will want a fast resolution from your support team. Most of the technical issues can be resolved by searching on the internet. Thus, more than 70% of users expect a business site to use a self-service portal.

Self-service portals will help you in reducing support tickets. You can provide a knowledge base to your customers. This will ensure that your IT support staff members don’t need to waste their time in solving common problems. Your users will also quickly resolve their time. They don’t need to wait for your support staff to revert back. If your users are unable to solve the problem, then they can send a support ticket to your team.

This will help you in improving your SLAs. It will also help you in reducing the support ticket frequency. Self-service portals will help you in improving user satisfaction as they can solve their problems easily.

Root cause analysis

Your IT support desk might resolve problems that are actually a symptom of some greater issue. You might think that all the incidents are unrelated. However, all these problems are connected to a single problem.

Root cause analysis or RCA can help you in finding the root cause of your problems. It is a systematic process that will help you in finding the root cause of events. This approach is based on the simple idea that you should solve the root cause of this problem. It will help you in preventing the same problem in the future.

You should apply the RCA approach to every support ticket. Make sure that your team is adding relevant details with every incident log. After that, you should use look for trends and patterns in this data. Various IT support platforms are offering RCA capability to their users.

If you are solving the root cause problem, then it will help you in eliminating all the associated tickets and issues. This will help you in reducing the support tickets that you receive.

Automation

There are various automated customer service options available in the market. These options will help you in minimizing or reducing your tickets.

Automation platforms will help you in filtering and categorizing your support tickets. They will help you in solving simple problems. It will help you in increasing the response times. Automation platforms will provide a self-service resolution to your users.

You should look for ways to add automation to every process. This will help you in improving your team’s efficiency.

Training

A little training and education can help you in reducing your support tickets. You should provide some training to your users. This will ensure that your users can deal with simple recurring issues.

You can create a knowledge base for your users. This will ensure that your users can learn about the common issues. Some companies are also providing formalized training to their customers and employees. If your users can solve simple IT problems, then it will help your IT support team is focusing on serious issues.

Conclusion

These tips will help you in managing and reducing your IT support tickets. Make sure that you are providing effective problem resolution to your users. This will help you in improving your SLAs. If you don’t have access to your own in-house IT support team, then you should consider working with an MSP. Experienced MSPs like Bleuwire can help you in providing IT support to your business and users. They can help you in solving both simple and complex IT problems. Thus, you don’t need to worry about hiring an in-house 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.