What do you Really want from your helpdesk?

Take a minute and think about your help desk and what you want from it. Then ask yourself “If a vendor performed the way we did AND cost the same, would I hire them? 

Before deciding on why you might want to outsource your helpdesk or improve your service, the first step is to retrospectively evaluate what you already have: what’s working. What’s not. And whether it’s worth investing more time and money to get your helpdesk the way it should be.

Here are some common problems the majority of companies face with their help desk:

• More than 69% of your users complain they are put on hold too long—For a better understanding of responsiveness of your helpdesk, see this recent post.
• More than 30% of your users are not satisfied with the resolution your helpdesk provided— Printer problems that took days? Email issues that took weeks? Passwords that took hours? What about fixes that don’t quite address all the symptoms of the problem? Users just want things to work. Can you blame them? Shouldn’t you help them find a way to work in a tech environment where when a problem arises, it gets resolved completely?
• Over 45% of your users don’t think they were given a solution at all— resolutions sometimes never satisfyingly resolved. Your users likely have reoccurring issues because their problem was mis-diagnosed or the problem not completely identified. The helpdesk was either too busy or miscommunicated next steps with the user.
• Nearly 50% of your users will try troubleshooting their issues even if they called the helpdesk—out of frustration of having built mistrust with the “IT guys”, 48% of users try and solve their computer headache using YouTube (while on the clock!).

Now let’s think about how you can fix these 4 common problems:

More responsive helpdesk—If your users feel like they’re waiting too long to simply report a problem, let alone get a solution, your staff may be overburdened with their other responsibilities. Do you really want to invest more money (salary AND benefits) in more dedicated workers? What about getting responses after 9-5? Do you want pay overtime? (Finding high quality after hours support is tough!)

Slow resolution times, no good fix or trying to solve their own problems—your users simply don’t trust your help desk support. Maybe your IT team is too busy to adequately address ALL of your user’s issues. Maybe you don’t have enough training for specific issues (or a growing body of technical support knowledge to easily remediate a spectrum of issues).

Maybe your help desk guys are talking over your user’s heads—they know the tech, but they don’t have the patience or soft skills to resolve your users’ issues. Whatever the case may be, you would need to replace, hire and manage your IT support desk to make sure they are solving user problems quickly. Do you have time for that? Can you afford to wait to replace techs on your team that aren’t working out? What about dealing with turnover (IT is riddled with turnover- the grass is always greener and computers are always better somewhere else!)

So now’s the time to ask yourself, can you Really afford keeping the helpdesk you’ve got? Do you have the resources to train, manage and re-staff hard-to-fill helpdesk seats in your company? With every new change to technology—even simple Windows upgrades—your users are going to persistently have problems and questions qualified help desk support teams should be able to answer.

If you’ve never thought about using an outsourced help desk solution, maybe you should think again!

Outsourced solutions give you:

Fully trained and compliant support—expert IT help desk support, trained in all the latest technologies. With superb documentation, a plethora of working knowledge and escalation processes to resolve any user’s ticket. Your help desk should also understand technology compliance issues for your industry. Outsourced helpdesks are focused on keeping your business (and its data) safe.

Responsive communication—keeping your users up-to-date with ticket status and resolution paths, expert helpdesk support make sure to involve your users so they are rest-assured their issues are getting handled. No more wondering if a ticket has been touched or a skeptical user that starts to YouTube their way into wasting their time (and yours) by making situations even worse!

Can you really afford to settle for your current internal helpdesk? Is your IT department better-served sticking to the hard-to-solve problems? Contact Us today to set up a help desk assessment to find out how to best-leverage your IT team.