Is Your IT Help Desk Support Working The Way You Want It To?

If your business is remotely like the majority of organizations that demand responsive enterprise-level IT Help Desk Support, you need to continuously reassess whether your help desk is sufficiently supporting your users.

Your help desk needs to answer your users’ questions and queries. Resetting a password to one user may be just as critically important to removing a virus or reconfiguring a printer for someone else. And if you have an internal IT Department that needs to innovate and plan for the future on top of day to day IT support, they may eventually drop the ball simply because they don’t have enough hours in the day to do it all.

With increasing demands on technology, your IT Department has and will become more and more critical to your operations. The problem they will face soon (if they haven’t already!) is that user issues will become a barrier to getting their critical projects completed. Queries, questions and issues are becoming more frequent (especially when users depend on multiple devices—much more than just a desk top computer. Think tablets, smart phones, laptops at minimum), which means more tickets and more time consumed simply dealing with small issues.

Can growing IT help desk demands simply be fixed by hiring the right IT help desk team?

The simple answer is yes. But hiring a dedicated help desk team internally is hard—recruiting, managing and engaging help desk workers takes long term vision. And hiring dedicated help desk technicians that can keep your users happy is expensive—especially when user demand for help desk is intermittent.

So, how can you evaluate whether your current IT help desk solution is working for your users?

Here are 5 signs that your tech demands may have exceeded your current IT Help Desk solution:

No easy way to track a user issue—enterprise-level IT Help Desks will keep users in the loop. You should be able to see whenever an IT support ticket has been touched and what a technician is doing simply by a click of a button.

Problem: most IT Help Desks don’t keep your users up to speed when their issue is getting handled. If the issue turns out to be difficult, they likely won’t communicate with the user of the problems until a user is in complete dissolution that their IT Support will never start working on their issues, leading to users attempting to troubleshoot their own problems.

The answer: keeping users updated with descriptions of what technicians have been doing at every step of the resolution process. If an issue needs to get escalated to more experienced technicians, the user will know in real time rather than twiddling their thumbs wondering if the IT guy is simply out for another smoke break.

Information is all over the place—most help desks fail to implement a good documentation system. Even when they DO document user issues and resolution plans, they inconsistently save and tag documentation. Most IT Help Desks recreate the wheel every time a recurring issue (especially where a resolution cannot be easily memorized), leading to increased downtime, lower productivity and fewer issues resolve than if you had a help desk solution that documented every issue with resolution plans!

Problem: Deja-vu—if your team is not recording tickets and resolutions to them, they are wasting your time and money, reliving solutions time after time!

The answer: consider choosing an IT Help Desk that, if needed to resolve a similar issue time and again, your users are up and running quickly because they have tools and documentation in place to resolve issues even faster the second time!

You’re spending your entire day searching your inbox—with all the emails you and your staff receive all day, should you really expect important communications regarding IT help desk tickets to be simply communicated via email? What if your user’s email isn’t working? Will your help desk continue sending impersonal email exchanges?

The problem: you and your users spend shouldn’t have to wait on emails about critical computer issues, especially when a quick phone call or text may expedite a resolution. If you had to sit at your desk with your inbox open all day just to get a response from your IT Help Desk, how much would you really get done? (Ahem, I’m not going to you to answer this one).

The answer: communication that makes sense. When issues are pressing, giving you or your users a phone call and follow up on issues so that problems get fixed. Actually, a good help desk should fix most issues on the first call.

Your issues are falling through the cracks—whether your IT Department is getting busier dealing with cyber security or are developing new software to engage your customers or create more efficiency in throughout your organization or simply have too many balls to juggle, small issues and help desk support tickets are likely the things falling through the cracks.

The problem: even small issues can be critical. And if overlooked, they can easily become big, debilitating issues that can quickly escalate into work stoppage situations!

The answer: a help desk needs to track when issues become overlooked (actually, a guaranteed ticket response time should be present in your Service Level Agreement—even if you have an internal help desk!).

You think your help desk needs to “Try Harder”—back when you were in school, if you weren’t very interested in a class or a project, you might have been tempted to just put things off until the last minute. Your teacher may have asked you to try harder simply because you might not have been giving even 70% of what you could have if you were interested in the topic!

The problem: If you’re thinking your IT Help Desk needs to try harder, maybe they don’t really like their jobs. If they consider their job as laborious much-hated homework, can you be confident that they’re really keeping your users safe?

The answer: IT help desk technicians should be folks that LOVE technology and want to work on your users’ issues because they love what they do and they’re passionate about computers and technology. If you get even the slightest sense that your help desk team needs to “try harder” to get issues resolved, your team is either (1) not communicating to users fast enough (see comments above about communication) or (2) they are not a good fit for an IT Help Desk role.

My Final Question: Is your IT Department or Help Desk doing what they do best? Do you suspect supporting your user’s questions, issues and queries is not what they enjoy or are good at doing?

If your IT help desk takes the time and energy to implement an effective help desk environment, it will be better for your users and, ultimately, your business. If you’re concerned your help desk might not be doing all it can to get user satisfaction, Contact me today for a FREE help desk assessment!