IT service desk is neither a profit center nor a cost center, but its contribution to a business is significant. A service desk supports a company’s tech users and enables the smooth operation of the technology ecosystem. The quicker a service desk solves an employee issue, the sooner the employees can get back to whatever they were doing.
To realize your IT operation efforts to the fullest, it’s time to look back at your service desk and improve it.
Treat Service Desk as You Would a Help Desk
The fact that you are here to read about the service desk proves that you’re ahead of most companies. Some don’t think twice before investing in customer support software that keeps customers happy and brings repeat business. But the service desk often takes the back seat. A service desk software is not just useful for customer support. It can orchestrate and streamline the processes for service desk agents, thus helping them assist employees better.
Service desk teams receive hundreds of tickets daily, and without a single point of contact to handle those tickets, IT issues could easily fall through the cracks. Employees could get stuck with IT issues for days, delivering much less than they are capable of. HappyFox customer Joe Runciman from Accelerate Education says,
“Assigning tickets to the appropriate users and departments helped funnel an otherwise unwieldy ticket pile.”
Customer support or employee support, the point is to have control over end-user issues. A service desk can help you automate recurring ticket actions and deliver customer-grade support experiences to both agents and IT users. Invest in your service desk as you would in a help desk to see the difference.
Prioritize Technology
Just like your customers, your employees may want to trade a phone call for a self-help article sometime. Your service desk agents may want a hands-free support process as a help desk agent. The major additions that can transform your support operations are automation workflows, self-service, business intelligence, and software integrations.
IT Automation
- Auto-extract email content for ticket creation and group tickets into different categories like service requests, incident management, or outages for priority management.
- Auto-assign tickets to the right agents with intelligent auto-assignment algorithms.
- Monitor SLA compliance and get instant real-time notifications on any SLA breaches or backlogs.
IT Self-service
- Create a self-service portal with a knowledge base and FAQ repository to help employees with repetitive and elemental questions
- Reduce the ticket inflow with agile, self-service-powered ticket deflection.
- Implement a mobile-responsive IT support center. HappyFox service providers offer a no-code, drag-and-drop solution to build support centers.
Business Intelligence
- Track ticket inflow from all channels of engagement, and use the data to match peak hours and agent availability.
- Drill down tickets for analyzing important KPI metrics like time to closure, average resolution time, first call resolution rate, escalation rate, etc.
- Quantify and improve agent performance with actionable insights from Agent Activity Reports.
The following are examples from HappyFox. You can extrapolate the idea to all service desks and external products.
Integrations
- Improve collaboration between developers and support by synchronizing ticket data between HappyFox and GitHub.
- Link support tickets and JIRA project tracking software for bug tracking and project management.
- Leverage remote helpdesk integration with LogMeIn Rescue to provide remote support and enable ITIL collaborations.
- Run incident management at a few clicks with HappyFox and PagerDuty integration.
Listen to Your Employees
But before and after you do any of these, ask your team members what their service desk expectations are and if it’s currently making any difference. If you look for answers outside, you may miss the scenarios that your own business stakeholders find important. Some users find it difficult to use the IT help desk in the first place. Starting from there to more pressing problems would ensure continuous improvements in your service desk performance.
Conduct regular surveys to get employee feedback and follow-up with the actions taken. This will also encourage the IT technicians to explore the service desk more and utilize it to their maximum benefits. After all, both employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction are invaluable business values.
Design the Experience Around Employee Satisfaction
These tips may not be one size fits all, but are widely proven to work for most businesses. The key is in tweaking the best practices for your needs. Ignore the trends and keep working with your employees to understand the scenarios that are important to them. After all, they are the ones a service desk is built around.
HappyFox offers the best help desk software for both modern IT teams and customer experience teams. Book a HappyFox Help Desk demo to accelerate your service delivery and make IT service management (ITSM) a breeze for your teams.
