How to Use Helpdesk Incidents to Identify Problems in Your Company

IT help desk provides guidance and assistance and troubleshoots issues that arise with computers, software and other IT infrastructure that your employees need to access in order to do their jobs.

By enabling your employees to work more efficiently, internal help desks are an essential part of many leading companies. But did you realize that aside from this, your IT helpdesk is actually a very good window into the overall state of affairs in your organization and can be used to identify areas that could be improved upon.

By analyzing the frequency of and different types of requests that your IT helpdesk employees provide assistance on, you may find trends emerging that you can act on.

1. Poor levels of IT literacy

When you work closely with technology it can sometimes be hard to remember that it doesn’t always come naturally to everyone.

Your IT helpdesk may be fielding many calls from people who are struggling to use their computers – particularly members of older generations who are not digital natives. If this is the case you could offer some basic computing training to your staff to reduce these types of requests.

2. Common issues that take up a lot of helpdesk time

You may also find your helpdesk staff are fielding the same types of requests over and over again for relatively straightforward tasks such as password resets, printing issues and reports of network outages.

You can save your helpdesk from these types of queries and free up their time to deal with other matters by implementing measures such as FAQs, employee self-service kiosk and utilizing DeskAlerts to send notifications to your entire workforce about known IT issues.

3. A need for security awareness training

Your helpdesk staff might be the first to realize that an employee has downloaded a virus or malware, fallen for a phishing scam or clicked on malicious links on the internet. It also may be that these types of incidents are happening somewhat regularly within your organization.

If this is the case you may find that security awareness training needs to be rolled out within your organization so your employees know how to identify a cyber threat and know what to do to keep your digital assets safe.

4. Increasing unreliability of systems, providers or vendors

Has your internet service provider had more outages than usual in the last month that has stopped employees sending and receiving emails? Has your server crashed? More than once? Has some software suddenly developed a glitch after a patch or upgrade?

If you notice these patterns in the calls to the helpdesk it can help you to determine whether your organization needs to upgrade equipment, escalate issues to vendor support or shop around for more reliable providers.