Good management of your
IT helpdesk involves creating a high level of cohesion between your internal
processes and the expectations of your external customers. Keeping everyone
happy and managing their helpdesk well is a difficult task. To do this, you
need the right tools, as well as well-documented and communicated processes,
that give your staff and customers the right levels of expectations.
We asked several
successful IT help desk managers for their best tips on how to manage their
support activity wisely: keeping customers satisfied and their technicians
accountable.
What the IT Manager
Said:
You should have a clear
understanding of all the metrics on your IT help desk, such as response time,
first call resolution, and recovery time after service interruptions, and how
to improve them to help with the bottom line.
These expectations come
largely from the past experiences of your company's IT support service and the
requirements of your users. In other words, a user can expect it to take X
hours to resolve a support ticket. Customer service conflicts or problems
usually arise when a user has a problem that cannot be resolved within the specified
time.
If you want to run your
IT helpdesk more efficiently, you need to ensure that you strike a balance
between providing the best customer service and the fastest response time for
your customers, within your internal operational constraints, such as budgets
and internal efficiency.
What can you do to find
a balance between satisfied customers and efficient IT support services? Let's
take a look at the top seven help desk admin tips provided by the IT support
administrators themselves.
Document Your Service
Level Agreement (SLA)
A service level
agreement (SLA) allows you to predefine your IT technical support services
internally and externally. This plain-language agreement between you and your client will allow you to measure the success of your services based on the
expectations you have already defined.
Once you have created
your SLA, you should use it to track your performance against your overall
business goals.
But tracking your SLA is
difficult. First, you're forced to manage a large amount of raw data, and
service level agreements need to be seamlessly integrated into your IT
departments, so frequent modification can be difficult unless it is.
Unless you take
advantage of a PSA system like SherpaDesk Computer Assist Software. With
Sherpadesk's SLA tool, you can accurately report metrics, such as how long it
took a customer to respond to you or how long it would take to resolve a
particular problem. This tool helps keep the IT support team on the right track
by monitoring whether their response and correction times meet agreed
parameters.
When you start using
SLAs to track the metrics that help you run your IT helpdesk, you need to be
sure to look beyond the arbitrary metrics and measure the things that will help
you achieve your goals. of your business
Document Your Process
New IT help desk
managers and technicians may face new problems day after day. To combat this,
it is recommended that its integration be fast. This will allow them to help
their clients as quickly as possible. One way to do this would be to ask
experienced technicians and IT help desk managers to document their processes.
Documenting your
processes and explaining how to solve specific problems will speed up your
production line and ensure customer problems are resolved faster.
This resolution documents should also be available to anyone who needs to access them. In this way,
future help desk managers and technicians who encounter a problem for the first
time can use the original solution to solve the problem, instead of wasting
unnecessary time finding a solution on their own. the same
When you Can’t Manage
the Time, Manage Self-Service Solutions
You might even think of
going beyond simply documenting solutions for your IT support staff and
considering documenting them for your customers through a knowledge bank.
It may not be possible
to offer technical assistance 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, due to personnel
or budget problems. However, that shouldn't stop you as a business owner or IT
support manager from being able to provide excellent support when your team is
offline.
Consider using the
self-service tool included with an IT support solution like SherpaDesk, which
has proven to be very effective in cases where your IT support team is busy or
out of the office. Having a knowledge base solution that guides users on how to
solve their problems enables them to take ownership of their own IT problems
and solve them themselves.
So how can this the self-service tools help you improve your IT help desk management skills? This
can certainly reduce costs. Self-service support costs $ 0.10 or less per
contact, while average live service costs (email, phone, or live chat) can cost
more than $ 13, meaning your staff can spend more time solving more complex
problems or pay more attention to VIP clients.
User End-to-End
Transparency
For any problem, complex
or not, the user and IT support technicians must be able to easily identify the
status of the problem.
This will allow IT to help
desk technicians to solve outstanding problems by being able to jump where
previous technologies have stayed. This saves time and reduces frustration for
your end-users.
Examine your outings
We mentioned earlier
that in order for your IT helpdesk to be managed effectively, you must examine
all of your operating results. This includes, above all, costs.
Determine how much it
costs you to provide an efficient IT support service, in particular, the costs
of solving each call or ticket.
When you have a good
indication of this cost, you can see what problems can be solved quickly and
cheaply. For example, if the majority of IT tickets going through your help
desk come from customers who need a simple and purposeful task, you might
consider using self-service support documentation, such as SherpaDesk, so that
your customers can help themselves.
See also how your IT
support team is divided. Do most of your teamwork on easier, low-maintenance
tasks, leaving only a few senior IT support technicians to handle the most
difficult tasks? Focusing on more difficult topics, while generating easier
tickets for self-service tools, will do wonders for their efficiency, not to
mention their results.
Choose Your Provider
Wisely
As the saying goes, it's
not the technology you use, but the way you use it. With that said, you need to
make sure you offer comprehensive support as an IT support provider.
Ultimately, IT
support software you use is there to help you improve your business and keep
your customers satisfied. So be sure to choose an IT support software solution
that is well suited to what you hope to achieve as a business and that also includes
all the features and integrations you need.
Final Takeaways
If you want to improve
the way you manage your IT helpdesk, choosing the right PSA IT helpdesk
software is essential. Let's say that when implementing a new helpdesk
solution, "get a little closer and often" is best. The worst thing
you can do is step in and try to change all your processes at the same time.
Doing it in smaller, more manageable steps means you will spend less time
focusing on mistakes and more time focusing on your overall business goal: to
provide the best service to your customers in an efficient and cost-effective
manner as possible.
It should also be noted
that if you want effective IT help desk management, you must assess how well
customers think their problems have been resolved.
This means that the first person to contact a customer must also be the follow-up contact, even if
the solution was provided by another staff member.
Managing your IT help desk doesn't have to be a difficult task, and you don't have to break the bank.
Choosing the right IT Helpdesk software and creating all your core processes
from scratch will enable your team to become experts in the systems and
processes necessary to get your job done right. This will help them feel
empowered and ready for the success of world-class IT support. This means
satisfied customers, and more customers mean a happy end result for your
business.