How to Reduce the Number of Help Desk Incidents

Your company’s IT help desk has an important role to play, providing support and trouble shooting technical issues that your employees may be facing on any given day.

Keeping your company’s IT functions up and running is obviously a priority for your help desk staff. But budget constraints, limited resources as well as ever-changing and growing user demands can put a strain on your IT help desk, and it may reach a point where the volume of service requests being received is too large to manage.

Unless you’re able to spend more money on the IT help desk, you’ll need to look at improvements that can be made to reduce the number of incidents that are being reported to the IT help desk staff to resolve.

1. Teach your staff to prioritise

When you have a known critical incident that is causing havoc for your employees and is taking up a lot of IT help desk staff time, fixing this to get your company’s systems up and running again needs to be the priority. So if people are calling through with other issues such as wanting software installed, that aren’t critical, you should direct your staff to get them to call back later.

2. Communicate better

When there is a known outage or issue that is causing large volumes of calls to the help desk, the staff will spend a lot of time fielding the same calls and giving the same information over and over again. You can free up help desk staff’s time by getting on the front foot and communicating to your employees directly about the known issue and give an estimated time of restoration.

An effective and efficient way of doing this is by using DeskAlerts, a system which sends pop-up messages to employees’ desktop screens in a way that can’t be missed and is therefore more reliable than email communication – cutting down on calls to the help desk.

3. Understand what your most common support problems are

Evaluate your help desk data to determine what the most common and easily solved problems are that your employees are calling to get assistance with.

Create a self-service function on your intranet site that helps your employees to solve these problems for themselves. You can provide both written instructions and short video tutorials.

Other problems might be caused by faulty software or hardware and if you notice that these keep arising and reoccurring, you can escalate to the appropriate place to find a permanent solution.

4. Have a pre-recorded message on your phone number

If you are experiencing a high volume of calls during a critical incident, placing a recorded message on the system explaining that there is a known issue and you are working to resolve it can eliminate many phone calls as the caller will be satisfied with this information.