Why Outsourced IT Help Desks Need To Go Beyond Your Expectations

You might think that when you call the help desk, you are simply considered a number—a name assigned to a ticket that eventually will get closed. And the quicker your number gets swept off their boards, the better.

Is that ALL a help desk is for?

What if your accounting, marketing, or operations departments solely referred to you—being outside of their department—by a number? Can you even imagine that? Why is an IT department—and by IT department, I am SPECIFICALLY referring to the help desk here—so different from the rest of your business? Why don’t they get to know you, what your routine is? When the best time is to call you? When you’re likely not on your computer or even that you are frustrated that you can’t print that report that was due to your boss half an hour ago (even though you are polite and undemanding when you’re calling in your problem).

Why shouldn’t a help desk understand who you are? As a worker, but also as a human being?

Today I wanted to talk about why outsourced help desk solutions—much more than internal help desks—care about your service experience. Why we are paying attention to the like of Zappos with “The Amazement Revolution”, their 7 chapters in amazing customer experience and the Disney Institute with their innovative thinking on how to set the stage for their customer’s magical experience in their parks?

The reason why we, as outsourced help desk solutions, strive to make sure your team members are treated as exceptional customers is that we need to work for your business. We can’t be complacent in giving you and your team mediocre service—unresponsive, un-empathetic, impersonal service.

We are in the business of creating raving fans. We want your users to not only be satisfied with getting their tickets resolved. We want them to have a better day—be more productive, happier and have more job satisfaction—by giving your team exceptional help desk support. Because we are constantly looking for more customers like you. Without your seal of approval, how are we to differentiate ourselves from the rest of your outsourced help desk options?

Outsourced help desks survive only if they perform well (we can’t rely on the notion that we’re safe inside an IT department). We have to constantly find ways to make ourselves more efficient, but also give you a reason to stay with us rather than migrate to the next shop.

Here are a few reasons why our clients keep us around:

We’re transparent about process— we know you want your issue resolved, but we also understand you want to be kept in the loop. From the moment you call in, we make sure that you know what the problem is, what steps we are taking to address it and if your issue needs to escalate to someone with a little more experience, we keep you informed from when your ticket gets opened to when it is resolved.

We’re avid listeners— when it comes to getting your issue resolved, listening for the details are key. Our technicians hear your view of the problem and follow up with questions for clarification just to be sure they’ve understood your issue. More often than not, tickets that take FOREVER to get resolved are from technicians not fully understanding an issue when they speak with a user. Good help desks make sure staff are attentive and user-centric. They use situational awareness to put a user’s specific problem into context. The short of things: having good listeners leads to faster ticket resolution and happier users.

We document EVERYTHING— since we have extensive documentation on how to solve issues, most user issues are resolved quickly. When an issue is kind of tricky, we have preset escalation paths to involve senior technicians. Without a good documentation system, your users’ tickets may get lost, accidentally closed or unresolved.

We take ownership of your needs— Ownership means that our help desk staff takes pride in resolving your issues. They care about your success and know that they are a key contributor to your user’s success. They value their work and want to help.

Most importantly, we invest in great people— The quality of your help desk support team is critical in making sure user issues are not only getting resolved, but that users feel like they are being well-attended.

Is your help desk Really focusing on your users’ needs? A help desk is an integral part of your business. Would you ever expect less than exceptional service when your team needs help? Contact us TODAY for a help desk assessment.