Keeping your service desk or IT help desk function smoothly can be a constant challenge. What may appear perfect right now may not be running as you desire in the future if you fail to take the right measures while you can.
IT works as the pillar behind modern enterprises. Everyone who's a part of the industry these days depends on IT services. And as far as customers are concerned, they expect the help desk to respond immediately when they have a request or an issue.
Unfortunately, even today there are many organizations still struggling with outdated processes and tools, making it more challenging for the help desk staff as well as the users. For enterprises encountering such problems; advanced IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions are ideal. The technology is known to transform your IT help desk services. Adapting and implementing ITSM platforms will not only boost your organization's ITIL capabilities - such as problem management and incident management - but can also dramatically improve the way you deliver your services without compromising on your productivity.
Along with integrating ITSM, organizations can also consider providing IT Ops training to the help desk staff to improve their capabilities and efficiency in understanding and handling the modern systems. But how can you ensure if your team is really ready to deliver on the IT help desk? What challenges it may face in the future? And what measures can be taken to avoid those challenges?
Dismiss Future Challenges of IT Help Desk with ITSM
Before a business considers adopting help desk technologies, it should first attempt to identify its specific requirements and the set of challenges the future can hold. Once this is sought out, the solution can meet those requirements. Here we have covered the top four help desk challenges of the future and how staff with online IT technical training can help dismiss them.
Inundated with Walk-ins and Phone Calls
Currently, your system may be well equipped to take care of the number of walk-ins and phone calls it receives. However, the number may increase in the future, causing trouble to the IT helpdesk to deal with it.
It's not uncommon for a user to pay a visit in person if the problem isn't addressed on the phone. As a result, the help desk is usually crowded, and the staff is constantly interrupted. This affects their productivity and has an impact on the overall delivery of service.
Not only this annoys the users on call, who have to wait several minutes just to get their call through, but also the onsite visitors, who have to wait in long queues just to get in touch with a help desk staff member. With so many open requests and complaints, resolving the issues takes longer too. As a result, the business starts losing customers.
An ITSM system promotes self-service portal, where users can directly login and raise online incidents. This reduces both walk-ins and phone calls, giving ample time to the help desk team to focus on resolving the problems. A trained individual will ensure they adopt an easy-to-use portal that all non-tech users can also utilize.
Lost Issues
Users want their issues to resolve fast and accurate. However, due to lack of communication tools, promising a quick management service can be challenging. This is particularly true for emails because it can get very tricky to track the status of each request and there's a big change for the issues to get lost.
According to a TechValidate survey, more than 40% of the traditional help desks relied on emails to track complaints, and requests and only 16% used spreadsheets to keep a track.
With ITIL system, the organization can integrate an automatic incident management system to process and keep a track accordingly. Once the incident is raised using the self-service portal, the request automatically moves to the incident management team from the resource. In case an issue is taking longer than expected, the IT desk, as well as the user, is updated about it. The user is also provided with reports to show the overall progress.
Recurring Issues
In cases where multiple users face the same issues at the same time - such as losing accesses to a corporate database - all of them may report the issue together. This does not only occupy a large bandwidth of the IT help desk but can also cause trouble for the staff.
Most IT help desk members are not aware of such systemic issues - especially if they are not certified or trained for IT Ops. Moreover, with issues recurring several times, it may take the team enormous amounts of time to investigate and resolve the issues.
With the advanced system, the problem management helps identify, track and resolve such systemic issues. The problems are analyzed to figure out the underlying cause and fix it once and for all. This helps prevent future incidents, does not involve a lot of work, and guarantees user satisfaction.
Asset Tracking
With the traditional IT help desk systems, keeping track of assets for each and every user can be a mess. For instance, if a user reports a problem with their laptop, the team is required to get into details like the service history, model, software, etc.
Similarly, it can be a massive challenge to find out which users will be affected if one of the servers go down for maintenance. ITSM is the ultimate solution to this challenge as it automatically keeps track of assets for each user.
The IT help desk team is able to maintain an accurate record of all the assets and their associated users. By automating this crucial system, the burden on the management will be reduced, and the organization will always have an updated view of users' assets.
With ITSM and IT Ops training, tackling these futuristic challenges of IT help desk will be possible. Just make sure you integrate the right system and train your team accordingly to transform your IT help desk services into a user-friendly, efficient powerhouse.