As more and more enterprises move to remote work models, IT faces massive pressure to step up their remote support.
Remote working can be expected to cause a huge spike in incoming tickets. The demands on the support team thus shift from solving day-to-day IT issues to handle more unique requests, initiate proactive support, enable better self-service, all while maintaining productivity, process optimization, and cost control.
That sounds like a long haul. As expectations amplify, you need more than existing technologies and best practices to ensure better support to remote employees. How do you go the extra mile? What do you do to future-proof your remote support?
Managing Remote Support
To keep the show going during the lockdown, businesses quickly moved to remote working. Since then, some companies have gone back to offices, some follow hybrid work models, and some are even pondering permanent remote working. How is this possible? A decade ago, a simple service outage would suspend the entire organizational process for a few hours until it gets fixed. The answer is an IT help desk, that leverages advanced AI capabilities and out-of-the-box communication offerings to support mass remote employees.
Proving fast, quality support while maintaining efficiency, morale, and costs is the primary aim of IT support no matter where employees are located at. There is a swath of help desk resources and AI tools available today that businesses can use to ensure normal business processes with minimal disturbances. Businesses dived headfirst into remote working and had little time to adjust; the help desk made their transition easier. With processes already orchestrated and set in motion, businesses could easily resume their daily activities with maximum compliance. But the growing influx of support requests still needs addressing. It calls for better alignment and optimization of the help desk for remote support needs.
Optimizing Remote Support with IT Help Desk
A help desk is a canvas with myriad opportunities to build upon. You just need to identify what your needs are. You need a centralized help desk to host all your operations with utmost structural integrity. Moving to a cloud-based solution will be a good start if you haven’t already. A cloud-based SaaS solution provides you a secure, fully managed, well-orchestrated working environment for users located anywhere in the world. Centralization of workflows, actions, and processes is crucial for an issue lifecycle to seamlessly flow from start to end. This makes an omnichannel approach to support more relevant than ever, as connecting the support experience across time and place is a prevalent issue in remote working.
The help desk solution for IT offered by HappyFox helps you map the user journey effectively with omnichannel capabilities. By tracking and managing all requests in a single interface, you will have better control over the support operations. Employees can raise requests from any channel they want — mobile app, website, email, phone call, or chat and you can still support them with ease.
The rising demand for remote IT support has brought forth the following shifts in the way support is provided.
From Ad-hoc Support to Conversational Support
But remote working has led to employees demanding support in more disorderly fashions, like texting on Slack. Messaging applications like Slack and Microsoft Teams have surged in popularity as they provide an easy means for employees to stay connected all day. When support is as easy as sending a text, why would employees bother to write an email or make a phone call? They won’t. Conversational support becomes a must-have, where you support employees directly from messaging channels like Slack.
Employees can thus get the support they need without leaving the application. HappyFox Assist AI combines the accountability of the help desk and the flexibility of messaging applications to help you support employees within Slack. While AI-powered self-service bots take care of most of the common requests, your agents can step in only when it’s needed.
Ensuring compliance in Slack support
As much as Slack support helps you improve accessibility and automate repetitive requests, it makes process compliance critical. Read more.
From Assisted Service to Self-service
Self-service capability is another key reason why conversational support became relevant now. Employees can’t walk up to the support desk and clear their doubts anymore. They are also expected to face more issues with VPN access, asset management, and access provisioning — repeatedly. Having your agents cater to these repetitive requests can affect productivity and sidetrack more meaningful tasks. With a properly updated knowledge base and FAQ articles, you can enable employees to get the answers they want, when they want it.
Using a knowledge base or chatbots to provide basic support is not a new concept, but the rising importance of self-service in remote working urges businesses to change their mindset towards it. Most businesses view self-service as an add-on tool to fall back on, and not as a tool that complements the shortcomings of their support function, which it is. By empowering users to self-serve themselves, you are not letting non-working hours or holidays interrupt the support experience. Businesses are realizing that “good enough” self-service won’t fly today, and they are vigorously optimizing it for excellence.
From Reactive Support to Proactive Support
Moreover, self-service will be your first step towards proactive support. The future of IT is proactive support, regardless of remote working. Employees halt work until they get their IT issues resolved. So do the agents, when they have to work on trivial issues over and over. So when reactive support steps in, the time is already wasted. Companies are trying to put an end to such service inefficiencies with proactive service using self-service, analytics, surveys, and performance enhancement through employee training.
From Manual Processes to Automation
Due to the pressure on IT support to drive maximum output with minimal effort, businesses are also rapidly adopting automation. Apart from IT workflows that present an obvious automation opportunity, businesses are extensively automating asset management, access provisioning/revoking, approval management, and a host of other IT use cases. Removing daunting manual tasks makes way for important, higher-value tasks.
Takeaways
Whether you are adapting to the remote working era or trying to optimize IT support for empowered employees, AI-led help desk advancements are the way forward. In light of that, we discussed some key optimizations you can make:
- Move to a secure cloud-based environment for data centralization
- Take an omnichannel approach to connect experiences across platforms
- Adopt conversational support on Slack to enhance accessibility
- Push greater self-service adoption with a knowledge base and chatbots
- Place emphasis on proactive service
- Automate IT workflows for greater efficiency
HappyFox offers a help desk solution for IT that will help you ready your IT support for the future. Schedule a demo to discuss your IT support needs with a product expert.
