Technology is continuously changing the way businesses operate. Organizations across all industries have revised their IT strategies to survive, scale, and excel in this digital era. More than ever, IT support plays a huge role in shaping employee experiences. Read why IT Support matters and how to improve it for better employee relationships.
What is Employee Experience?
Employee experience is the total of every interaction an employee has with an organization. It includes the emotions, knowledge, skills, and perceptions gained as a result of association with the organization. Organizations are increasingly recognizing people as their greatest assets and are therefore taking a great interest in investing in the employee experience.
How IT Support Influences Employee Experience?
IT Support occupies a huge part of employees’ experience throughout their lifecycle in an organization – they undertake conference calls, learn different systems and applications used within the organization, pursue e-learnings during onboarding to increase their skill set. Their days are filled with IT processes. Most importantly, how employees internally communicate with each other has drastically changed. In the earlier times, organizations switched from telephones to emails as a predominant form of communication. Now, Slack and Microsoft Teams are gaining immense popularity and usage as a mode of communication.
People, process, and technology form the three pillars of any organization. With technology and process changing rapidly, it is no wonder that employee experience is shaped by IT and IT-related support.
Why is IT Support Important?
Every employee faces situations where they seek help from the IT Support Teams. Here are a few classic examples showing how essential a role IT support plays in an organization.
- Minutes before your client meeting, your video conferencing system wouldn’t switch on.
- You realize your reporting dashboard is loading too slow during your review.
- You have an urgent need to onboard new employees with a special stack of IT assets.
- A recent version of the browser is facing issues across the organization.
- Employees need help to set up their home office during a lockdown.
With changes come challenges. Both employees and IT support teams need to ride through this wave of change whenever they upgrade their IT systems and applications.
Challenges for the Employee
Most of the employees’ challenges revolve around eliminating the initial resistance associated with any new way of working. They are twofold.
1. Coping With Changes
Organizations adopt newer IT systems for various reasons, ranging from device choices to the installed applications. Employees are forced to grapple with this constant change and learn to adapt to it.
2. Need for Quality IT Support
As employees learn newer systems, they start to rely on the IT support teams for personalized assistance. An ineffective IT tech support harms the employee experience and also the success of the IT strategy.
Challenges for the IT Support Team
The challenges faced by the IT support teams involve workload, the need to learn new systems, and the fatigue arising from dealing with repetitive support requests.
1. Repetitive Questions from Employees
The support teams can get repeated queries from their employees. These queries can range from basic aspects of communication software or more advanced queries on their internal software. Repetitive questions hamper support team productivity and eat up the time they could be spending on more complex issues.
2. Dealing with Technological Complexity
As systems and processes change in an organization, it is a challenge for the IT support teams to equip themselves with the required knowledge and skills to support the entire organization.
How to Improve Your IT Support?
- Be Reachable
- Provide Self-service
- Provide Quick and Effective Resolution
- Educate Support Agents
- Use Mobile Apps to Improve Productivity
- Use Asset Management to Track Hardware and Software
Your IT support teams can transform the quality of service given to your employees by adopting the following techniques. Improve your IT support constantly as it has a huge impact on the employee experience.
1. Be Reachable
As systems and processes get complex, employees need to have an assurance of support throughout their working hours. With planned rotation schedules and self-service, offer round-the-clock support to employees in need.
2. Provide Self-service
Employees are smart. If you can give them the required tools to help themselves, they would leverage it and be proactive in the future. Offer easy escalation options for more complex issues. Some of the commonly available self-service tools you can use are Knowledge Base, Chatbots, Faq pages, and a Support Center.
3. Provide Quick and Effective Resolution
A major component of employees’ experience is their level of engagement and focus on their daily work. Constant IT issues could seriously impair the resolution time and speed. Incorporate optimal resourcing, employ automation workflows, provide multichannel support, and constantly fine-tune the operations to provide quick and effective resolutions.
4. Educate Support Agents
Equip your support agents with frequent training and resources so that they are prepared to assist the employees better. Of all people, your support agents should keep abreast of the changing processes in your organization. IT support objectives extend beyond being a call center. They ensure that anyone in need of technical support can easily get it faster.
5. Use Mobile Apps to Improve Productivity
Mobile app support is not a luxury, but a must-have in your arsenal of IT support tools. Mobile apps are intuitive to use and are perfect for employees seeking support on the go. HappyFox Mobile Help Desk helps you set up iOS and Android mobile support to create, streamline, and resolve support tickets just the way you do on the desktop. This improves agent productivity and provides another platform for the support needs of your employees.
6. Use Asset Management to Track Hardware and Software
Managing assets is an important part of IT service management (ITSM). Your support team members may constantly need data related to hardware and software assets when resolving issues pertaining to them (similar to CRM in customer support). Asset Management is used to track and manage hardware and software assets in one place.
With HappyFox Asset Management, you can track and manage your hardware and software assets in one place.
How IT Support Improves Employee Experience?
- Higher Engagement Levels
- Clear Purpose and Meaning
- Greater Social Connection
- Alignment With Organizational Functions
- Strong Brand Impression and Loyalty
Providing exceptional IT Support promotes employee experience in multiple ways, all of which drive important employee metrics and promote employee wellness. These 5 factors could indicate that you provide effective IT support that makes your employees’ lives easier.
1. Higher Engagement Levels
As the dependency and trust on IT support increases, employees begin to worry less about IT queries and focus on their work better. When employees don’t have unresolved issues hanging over their heads, they begin to find greater satisfaction in their day-to-day work.
2. Clear Purpose and Meaning
Every interaction an employee makes with IT support services is an opportunity for the organization to help the employee understand the broader objectives and the IT strategy. Beyond resolving the current issue, you can encourage your employees to learn the overarching purpose and its guiding principles.
3. Greater Social Connection
As employees leverage IT systems better, their connection with fellow employees improves. With the IT service desk being the backbone of any organization, their internal engagement improves. By building a strong, co-dependant community of like-minded teams, you can attain your goals faster.
4. Alignment With Organizational Functions
A customer who gets quick support feels relieved and gains knowledge and awareness about the processes. The inherent learning enables them to understand better and leverage the functioning of the IT platform.
5. Strong Brand Impression and Loyalty
Finally, employees develop a positive and healthy impression of the organization. It translates into higher productivity and better output. Customer loyalty is not the only kind of loyalty your organization needs. Your employees being the face of your organization, need to believe in your vision. When both of your visions are aligned, and in harmony, you will reap positive results in heaps.
Conclusion
With dynamic shifts in an organization’s business process and platforms, providing strong IT support is a core component for organizational effectiveness. This invariably influences the professional and personal lives of every employee. Hence, constantly improving IT support is clearly a differentiator for an organization that leads to exceptional employee performance and productivity.
HappyFox Help Desk Ticketing System reimagines the way you provide IT support. In the line of efficient internal support, HappyFox’s latest product Assist AI leverages AI and Conversational Ticketing to provide IT support to your employees within Slack and Microsoft Teams. With powerful features targeting the complexities associated with your entire organization’s IT needs and communication silos, Assist AI puts an end to gruntwork and inefficiencies, one at a time.
Sign up for a HappyFox demo for all your employee experience and customer experience needs!
