6 Best Practices for Your IT Help Desk

Your organization’s IT help desk is one of your most important corporate resources. With companies relying on technology to carry out so many important tasks, it is inevitable that systems will go down, software will not work properly and other issues will arise that need troubleshooting.

Having a high-functioning IT help desk that goes above and beyond can make the world of difference in your operations. If you aren’t following best practices in your help desk operations, you may have low customer satisfaction and, worse, the operations of your entire organization could be suffering.

Here are some ways to determine if you are following help desk best practices:

1.Regularly survey your clients

By regularly carrying out customer satisfaction surveys, you will have valuable information about how your help desk is performing. You can do this with your call tracking software. By constantly examining your performance, you can aim to continuously improve.

2. Document everything by assigning it a ticket

Whenever you have a request or incident record it in your customer service system to ensure you are able to see the big picture of your company’s processes. No matter how urgent or how small the request is, having your help desk team track and record every interaction they have with your customers will give you valuable data about who is using the help desk and why. You can see trends and find solutions to reduce call loads.

3. Hire the right people for the job

Having technical skills and knowledge is obviously something you’d look for in an IT help desk staff member. But it’s also important to ensure the people takin the calls have good communication skills and good people skills.

4. Focus on improved communication

Keep your users informed about the progress of their problems. Even though you may be working on finding a solution, they can perceive silence as being that their requests aren’t being worked on or are maybe even being ignored. Let the user know what steps you are taking to give them reassurance.

5. Reduce the call load with DeskAlerts

When you know that your systems are going to go offline for scheduled maintenance, or you’re having an issue with some systems or software, you can deploy DeskAlerts to keep your staff informed.

DeskAlerts will send a pop up straight to the user’s desk top informing them of the situation. You can continue to keep staff updated as the situation changes. By doing this, you will take the pressure off your help desk, otherwise your staff will be tied up answering the same questions over and over again.

Our client Companies House in the United Kingdom implemented DeskAlerts to take the pressure off of its technical support department. It proved to be a successful way to deliver information to satellite offices while decreasing the load on tech support and improving their internal workflow.

6. Develop self-help tools

Give your staff the ability to help themselves through some of the more common and straightforward problems they may have by developing a self-help knowledge bank that can be accessed around the clock on your intranet site.