Outsourcing vs. In-House IT Help Desk

Small and medium-sized enterprises increasingly rely on information technology (IT) to dramatically increase productivity, improve efficiency, and increase competitiveness. But when an IT accident occurs, small businesses suffer. This is because most small businesses cannot afford to have IT professionals on their payroll and it can take hours or even days to call an IT specialist. That is bad news.

The good news is that it is becoming more affordable for small businesses to outsourced service desk and level the competition for business tycoons. This section discusses the key differences between outsourcing IT help and IT guru staff retention, and discusses the benefits each option offers.

Benefits of IT Help Desk Outsourcing

One of the main benefits of outsourcing an IT help desk is the potential for cost savings. Outsourcing your IT helpdesk saves your IT professionals the salary and benefits costs, saving you business costs in terms of payroll. And if everyone's technology works smoothly, you don't have to spend money on IT to be idle.

Another reason why small businesses choose to outsource their help desk service is 24x7 availability. In-house IT professionals typically work from 9 a.m. at 5 p.m. Monday to Friday. But what if your workers or customers need help after hours? When outsourcing with a trusted IT company really pays off. In addition, external IT help provides faster response times than internal services, and generally faster than internal services. This is because internal deployments often only have one person responsible for the needs of the entire company. Employees continue to wait for help, not only reducing productivity but also negatively impacting customer service.

An added benefit of external IT support is that you can find a niche or industry-specific company. When it comes to troubleshooting, solving common industry problems, and proactively addressing issues, this can go a long way.

Benefits Of Maintaining It Support Internally

While there are many benefits to outsourcing an IT help desk, there are also benefits to maintaining internal IT support. A great advantage of in-house IT help desk over outsourced IT is that on-site professionals work daily with other staff. This allows you a comprehensive understanding of your specific business IT needs and the identification of potential obstacles. The valuable information obtained by internal experts can be difficult to replicate with outsourced IT.

Also, many small businesses have only a few payroll accounts, so IT support needs are minimal. If this is the case for small businesses, it may make financial sense for one of today's employees to take on additional responsibility for IT support. If you maintain IT support internally, make sure that your IT team members have clearly defined responsibilities. Also, be aware that you may need IT coverage during unusual days or hours of work.

10 Things To Check Before You Start At The Help Desk

When a new help desk job begins, there are a few things you need to understand right away before the call begins. Previous experience can guarantee that the following points should be covered before You Start job at help deskservice. This process is sometimes called "lining the ducks."

1: Get Comfortable

Is the work area configured correctly? Do your feet hit the floor? Does your knee hit you under the desk? In short, is your workstation right for you? Being comfortable means focusing on the subject of the caller, not lingering back pain.

2: Learn Registration System

Do you have the correct reference material on hand to fully explain the call recording system? In my experience, no two companies record calls in the same way or use the same set of priority criteria. Make sure the team leader shows you where to find everything.

3.Get The Correct Permissions

Do you have the required access rights? If you need to change your password, do you have the necessary privileges? Is the procedure clearly explained? I have been stuck in the past with people requesting password resets for retired workers. Just consulting with the team leader saved us from a shameful fake.

4: Know The Limits

What are your power limits? Is it permissible to block the abuser's account or should I refer to higher privileges? Be sure to read the relevant documentation of the IT usage policy so you can see what is allowed and what is not.

5: Determine The Objective Of The Work

What is the scope of your remittance? What are the requirements outside the scope of the help desk? If you are in charge of replacing the bulbs, make sure you have the required certifications. Here in England, a progressive nightmare of litigation culture has come and you must qualify for a bulb replacement at work.

6: Know The Policy

What is your company's policy on malicious calls? What warning should I give before ending the call? You may rarely receive a malicious call, but it is helpful to know what to do before it happens.

 7: Find Out About Breaks

When are breaks allowed? The help desk can be a stressful workplace and it may take a few minutes to clean your head. Of course, you won't leave when you get a phone call, but make sure you know your policies for taking eye breaks.

8: Know The Hierarchy Of The Company.

Is the company structure easy to understand? Is there a directory that fully describes where everyone fits in the organization? I remember receiving a call from the person I named. Then I asked him what department he worked for. In the next quiet, a colleague hastily scribbled a note to me.

9: Know Your Boss

Who can I contact and how can I contact them? Have you met your line manager? Or did you just speak to the team leader at the time of hiring? Before you begin, take the opportunity to chat with them, see how they are made, and most importantly, let us know a little about yourself.

10: Know What To Wear

What is the office dress code? There's only one thing worse than showing up in a T-shirt and jeans and tie. That's showing up in the office for suits and ties, shirts and jeans.

Five Ways to Get The Most Out Of Your Help Desk

There are many things you should and should not do when it comes to facilitating meaningful interactions with your help desk outsourcing companies. Here are the five that give the best results in all aspects.

After having worked at the IT help desk a few years ago, customer service is still a big topic for me, and there are some opinions that apply to internal and external support services. Justin James wrote a great article for Tech Republic a few years ago titled "5 Things Service Technicians Can Do to Improve Services." With that in mind, here are 5 ways to get the most out of your help desk.

1. Become A Good Customer To Get Excellent Customer Service.

Help desks are a stressful place for both those who work and those who need services. IT engineers understand this. As a result, many of them have powerful "bedside manners" skills that are as significant as technical knowledge. Users can understand that if the system malfunctions, email does not work, or mobile devices are stolen, users may become angry, frustrated, or fearful.

2. Observe The Rules.

All the companies I worked with had a system to track help desk tickets. This is essential to avoid pure agitation as some users compete for the technician's attention. Because the system is there, the user community has a single point of contact, allowing IT to classify and prioritize problems.

3. Make A Plan In Advance.

It always breaks If your computer is just a blue screen and needs to run in a 10am meeting, be sure to contact support immediately. That is its purpose.

What if you know you need equipment to hire a new employee starting next week, or if you want to rent a mi-fi for a business trip this Friday? The same answer applies as before. Call the help desk service immediately. The best time to learn about long-term user needs is at 9 a.m. on Monday. The worst moment? As expected, two minutes before it was necessary. I heard that a help desk technician actually takes over the parking lot at 5:30 p.m. and ask if it's possible to set up a new user on a bright Monday morning. Let's go everyone. There is no such thing as opening a ticket early.

4. Triangulate The Problem To Provide The Best Possible Input.

I used the phrase "dead in the water" in Tip 2 because I often heard it while working at the help desk. However, in practice, the system only applies to people who are smoking ruins or otherwise unusable. In many cases, I ran into an issue where one browser was not allowing me to access the site, but the other browsers were working fine. Also, some people could not print to a local printer, but printing to a network printer worked. These findings reduced the impact of the problem. It was still important and needed a solution, but the user was not really "dead underwater".

5. Describe The Problem In Detail.

Follow the basics of the "5 W" report when you register your application. "Who, what, when, where, why". For example, a help desk ticket that says "Unable to open PST file in C: drive in Outlook" works better than "Help" or "Outlook does not work". Include what you were doing, the last time it worked, what you tried to fix, how you tried to fix the problem, and other helpful details.

10 Essential Skills Needed For A Help Desk Job

Working at a help desk or in a support role is a great way to reach the main customers and products of any business. The help desk service work helps you connect with your customers, understand their experience with the company, and know what's inside and outside of your product. To go further on a help desk or support career, you need a specific combination of skills, values, and personal attributes.

10 Essential Skills Needed For A Help Desk Job

1. A True Desire To Help Others.

This person does a great job because he really wants to help others, not "my job." They play hard, find pleasure in their daily work, and are passionate about their role.

2. We Work Together, Not For Our Clients.

A good support agent considers you an equal partner and an extension of your team. Customer identification as a partner enables the support agent to treat the problem as their own and provide the level of service they expect.

3. A Positive And Optimistic Approach To Problem Solving.

Support work can be difficult, but this person does not allow adverse customer interaction to become contagious. When faced with a tense or imposed situation, this person knows how to stay logical and focus on solving the problem. They approach the client with empathy, they don't complain about the client when things get difficult and they look for what can be learned from the situation.

4. Create And Foster A Playful And Relaxing Work Environment.

This person enjoys work and spreads a positive attitude. A good support agent will add a little fun to your daily tasks and make everyone's life a little easier. Office pranks are always a fun way to do this.

5. Joint Team Spirit.

This person feels responsible not only for their task, but also for the team's workload. They know when to ask for help and offer and understand how much they can do at the same time. They care about the success of their team and are willing to sacrifice their personal goals when necessary to help them achieve their goals. It can be helpful to know what your team can do as you can be drawn to calls that last for hours.

 6. Passion For Products.

Great support agents are knowledgeable champions of their products. They are interested in their use, understand how they work inside and out, and strive to improve them. This natural curiosity plays with them and really understands how the product works, as well as how to fix it when something breaks. The passion for this type of product is also contagious when it comes to customer interactions.

7. Star Communication Skills.

A good help desk agent simply enjoys communicating with clients. They know that listening and understanding is essential before listening. This person strives for transparency and communicates with Tact. They know how to apply their style to different types of clients. This can range from being a good friend to just solving a problem. Their natural educational skills help customers understand the product enough to solve the problem on their own.

8. Customer Advocates: Balanced.

This person will feel your pain and use your resources to help you reach the solution. Beyond personalized customer support, we solve problems globally and help more customers. It is as simple as updating the knowledge base information or submitting a bug or feature request. At the same time, they know how to prioritize their day and be careful not to delve into a problem at the expense of other clients.

9. True Respect For Clients.

In a help desk job, it is important to recognize customers by name and build meaningful relationships with them. This person manages the client's needs, regardless of their technical or product knowledge, and does not always respect and favor them.

10. Detective Problem Solving Skills.

From the moment the ticket is submitted, this person knows how to ask the right question and how to collect the available data to reduce the root cause of the problem. Like Sherlock Holmes, they don't throw a stone to understand what's really going on.

8 Things You Should Know Before Working At An It Help Desk

Becoming an IT Help Desk technician is a rapidly growing task. If the customer asks for a crashed computer, a software bug, or a suspected virus, the customer may have been working on a deadline. Suddenly, their deadline is yours. "End users will expect to do everything in technology and know how to fix the problem.

The truth is, not everyone is dedicated to the work of help desk support services But for those who do, it can be an exciting and rewarding opportunity. Read expert insights on what it really is. That way you can determine if you have what you need.

8 things you should know ...

1. A Common Entry For Occupations

If you are interested in establishing a technology career of any kind, using an IT helpdesk is a great first step. Field experts want to test their skills at the help desk before turning an IT technician over to another task.

2. After A While, You Won't Be So Surprised

Working at the help desk is a testing ground for IT professionals. You will be exposed to all unexpected situations. As soon as you think you've seen it all, another ambiguous problem arises.

3. Not All The Answers Are Always There

Help desk technicians are often viewed as specialists who should know everything, but no one can be that person. This raises the question of where to turn when unavoidable things happen. Before the arrival of Google, Petersen remembers asking his colleagues for help. If you have not addressed a particular problem before, it is likely that someone else is having the problem. It is important to create a network of professionals who can apply.

4. You Inevitably Deal With Difficult People

I don't like opening the computer so that only the error message is displayed. Just because someone calls you means they face some kind of problem, and everyone treats the problem differently. You can expect to interact frequently with challenging clients.

5. Patience Is The Key

The people with the highest technical support are good, patient listeners. Successful help desk technicians need tolerance to deal with even the simplest problems frequently

6. Help Clarify Your Career

Johnson says the best help desk technicians are ambitious and their goal is to go beyond help desk work. In this position, you will be introduced to various aspects of the field and help you decide where you want to pursue your professional career. Whether you focus on a specialized truck or expand your reach to become an expert in all areas, your help desk experience can help you plan for your future in the field.

7. Need To Master The Latest Technology.

The technology landscape is constantly evolving and new technologies and technologies are constantly being introduced. Petersen emphasizes the importance of staying on top of the latest trends and news.

 8. It Feels Good To Help People

Working at an IT help desk is certainly not a walk in the park, but our experts agree that the position certainly has its advantages. Petersen compares his role as a superman and comes to the rescue when people need him.

What Is The Difference Between The Help Desk And The Ticket Management Software?

Well basically ticket management is an important aspect of help desk management. Ticket management software allows helpdesks to maintain a database to maintain and manage their customers and their problems. Contains important information about customers, solutions to problems, etc. The company uses ticket management software as part of its integrated help desk software package to create, address, and respond to customer requests or concerns raised by company employees.

Tickets from the ticket management software are basically reports about a specific problem, its current status and other important data. The help desk support services  team or staff creates, updates, and manages these tickets. These tickets have a unique identifier, also known as a case. This identifier allows the team to more quickly identifies a request from a particular customer, add information to it, and inform the customer about the status of the request.

Here are six reasons why help desks always need ticket management software:

Manage information centrally in one place with ticket management software

Keep tracking and monitoring data easier and much faster. Rather than checking the number of emails your business receives on a daily basis, ticket management software gives you instant access and access to important information.

Provides Integrated Tracking And Reporting Metrics.

With ticket management software, you can quickly and easily track not only customer demands, but also employee work efficiency. The software program allows you to see how many tickets your help desk employees have worked on in a given month.

Helps Prioritize Your Organization's Workflow

Ticket management software makes it easy to prioritize workflows. You can quickly see which problem or customer request has the highest priority.

Add Transparency

The ticket management system helps you determine which teams or departments in your company receive the most support requests and make decisions about allocating support resources.

Promote Collaboration.

Ticket tracking systems facilitate collaboration and allow multiple people to address the same problem.

Ensure Continuity

Ticket management software solutions allow your business to continue. When one of the team members retires, there are no complex turnover problems related to their responsibilities.

The information is centralized in a database, so new or new employees can be quickly trained to take over the remaining tasks or assignments of retired employees.

The Ultimate Guide to Conducting An It Help Desk Survey

When technology fails, so do people. A hardware problem prevents an employee from logging into their computer and responding to urgent requests from the company's largest customers. Network problems can prevent your email or Internet access and prevent you from working entirely.

Fast and efficient IT support is essential for office productivity. For this reason, it is important for the IT support team to take the time to ask their customers (employees of other companies) what they are doing well and how they can improve. The best way to obtain this information is to submit a help desk survey.

The help desk service  teams with data to support the need to increase departmental budgets. Justify the company's investment in new tools or more support staff by providing survey data that shows how increasing budgets increases overall productivity.

Managing a help desk survey is not always a large and time consuming effort. By following some of the best practices and using the right tools, you can collect feedback with minimal effort and use it throughout the year to find new and better ways to provide technical assistance.

Why It Is Important To Track Customer Satisfaction?

Help desk surveys provide two important pieces of information to your IT support team. A list of factors that contribute to employee satisfaction or dissatisfaction after using IT support.

While this information will help the team improve their services, and perhaps most importantly, it will also provide comprehensive evidence of the need for larger budgets.

Being able to demonstrate to company decision makers that employee dissatisfaction is the result of waiting too long to receive support is a compelling argument for hiring more help.

Similarly, if we can demonstrate that dissatisfaction is due to lost tickets, we can insist that we invest in better admission and problem-tracking tools.

If you're having trouble convincing company leaders to invest in the resources your team needs, survey feedback can provide compelling evidence.

Follow these Five steps to begin collecting that evidence.

Step 1: Define The Strategy And Objectives

Before choosing a survey tool, writing your first question, or submitting your first survey, be sure to document your reasons for researching your customer over time and what you want to learn.

First, decide what information you want to collect from the survey. The most basic information answers two questions:

1.       Are your clients satisfied?

2.       If not, why?

Their strategy is simply to find answers to those questions.

Then define why the answers to these questions are important. This is your goal:

Strategy: Use a help desk survey to 

(1) measure customer satisfaction and 

(2) identify the factors that lead to dissatisfaction.

Purpose: This information will help 

(1) find ways to improve the team, 

(2) provide better service, and 

(3) improve productivity within the team and across the company.

Documenting your strategy and goals helps you focus on what really matters and helps you move to the next step.

Step 2: Write a List of Possible Survey Questions

You are ready to create a list of possible survey questions using your defined goals and strategies. Survey questions measure the elements defined in your strategy and provide the answers you need for your goals.

Use the sample questions below, or work with your team to compile a large list of potential questions. You don't have to worry about creating the final list right now. Document everything you can think of.

Examples of employee survey questions:

How satisfied are you with the quality of the support you receive?

How do you assess the technical knowledge of the support team?

How do you rate the professionalism of your support team?

Step 3: Explore Best Practices For Your Survey

In future steps, you will choose the right tools to administer your survey and complete your questions. However, before making these decisions, it is important to understand some of the best research practices to help guide your decisions.

Keep the survey short. A single question is ideal. If you need to lengthen it, take no more than 5 minutes to complete it. Remember that clients are already late for work due to technical problems. As a result, customers are unlikely to respond to long surveys.

If you need a longer exit survey, submit it later. Don't send long follow-up surveys right away. Wait a day for the client to catch up on his work. If your exit survey takes more than 5 minutes to complete, consider submitting it monthly or quarterly.

Ask open-ended questions only when absolutely necessary. It only takes a second to answer a multiple-choice question, but it takes a long time to leave a comment. Minimize open-ended questions to increase response rates.

Allow to answer "not applicable". Survey questions can confuse customers. If you don't know how to respond, we can stop the survey. Instead, provide an "Other" or "N / A" answer so you can skip questions that don't apply or don't make sense.

Show progress if possible. Include a progress bar or proactively indicate expected commitments. People who don't know how long it takes to complete a survey generally don't want to complete it.

Avoid asking unrelated questions. Find a tool that can incorporate logic to enter or omit a specific question based on the answers to previous questions.

Step 4: Complete The Survey Questions

The final question of the survey should provide the most detailed information, that is, the information necessary to achieve the objectives defined in Step 1.

There are several ways to limit your long list of questions to the most important.

Eliminate redundant questions. Delete it from the list or combine it with a similar question.

Choose the one that is most relevant to your goals. If your goal is to minimize the number of support requests you receive, the question of why people need support may be more important than the question regarding the effectiveness or expertise of your support team. 

Hypothesis and proof. Start with a question and ask after each support interaction for a day, a week, or a month, depending on how often you receive support requests. At the end of each period, ask another question. Create a final list from the list that generated the most informative responses during the trial period.

Conduct a pilot survey. If your hypothesis and test are not your options, ask your volunteers to spend 30 minutes researching their latest IT support experience. See all the answers to determine which question produced the most valuable results.

Use these methods to narrow down your list of questions as much as possible. Please limit yourself to just one question. Once you have a final list, you are ready to decide how to administer your survey.

Hypothesis and proof. Start with a question and ask after each support interaction for a day, a week, or a month, depending on how often you receive support requests. At the end of each period, ask another question. Create a final list from the list that generated the most informative responses during the trial period.

Conduct a pilot survey. If you can't formulate hypotheses and evidence, ask your volunteers to spend 30 minutes researching their latest IT support experience. See all the answers to determine which question produced the most valuable results.

Step 5: Select The Survey Tool

If your existing ticket software or support system automatically sends emails to your customers when a team member closes a ticket, the easiest way to collect feedback is to include a survey link in the email template.

Create a survey using popular survey tools like Survey Monkey, Question Pro, and Type form, and add a link to the closed ticket email template.

This method is the simplest, but not always the most effective. For example, you must click a link to provide feedback. They may not know the link and simply delete the email or they may not have time to wait for the website to open to complete the survey.

Customer Thermometer offers a solution to this problem. Use this tool to insert a survey button into your email. This saves the customer from having to open another site to provide feedback, and the image used to provide feedback makes the request more prominent than a simple link.

What Is Help Desk Software & Why Help Desk Software Is Important?

In a nutshell, help desk software is a help desk resource interface, which aims to provide customers and end users with the highest quality support and best information about a company's products and services organization. The help desk service are organized with the help of good help desk software programs to solve problems and problems, and provide advice for various products and services, such as software programs, mobile devices, computers and more.

Large companies provide technical assistance through a variety of channels including email, instant messaging, websites, social media platforms, and websites.

There is also an internal help desk designed to provide help and support, but only for employees of the organization.

There Are Three Reasons Why Help Desk Software Is Important:

Tracking Customer Issues Can Be Time Consuming.

In the past, companies used to manually track customer problems. This also applies to solving these problems. Therefore, maintaining a spreadsheet or database of all customer problems and solutions is very difficult and not easy to organize. So, for example, if you want to get a report of the most frequent problems your customers face, it can take hours and even days to count and calculate to prepare your data.

Manually entering data or information into a spreadsheet (or worse, a printed file) is almost always prone to errors and many other conditions. What if a help desk employee forgets to include a customer problem on a particular day? Second, the integrity of the data is suddenly compromised, leaving doubts about the integrity and quality of other customer problems and solutions in the archive. Or what if your data is stored on a computer and that computer crashes without backing up your files?

The amount of email you receive is huge. Customer problems and demands are constantly in cracks.

Without a doubt, email has made communication faster with customers, and even within the organization. But flooding your inbox with emails every day is nothing more than waiting for a major disaster. Inform unsatisfied customers that their urgent request was "lost" or that their spam folder or email was "filled". This kind of excuse doesn't just fly.

Help desk software enables you to better manage the amount of email sent and received to handle customer requests, inquiries, and more. This will make your equipment and communication systems more efficient and optimized.

Our current customer service system allows customers to contact us only by email or phone, despite preferring the help of text messages, tweets or Facebook.

Today's help desks are social. Today's customers want to be able to respond quickly through their favorite channels by phone, email or Facebook. Spreadsheets cannot modify and manage customer requests and inquiries that come through multiple channels, such as email, phone, chat, text messages, and social media.

Helpdesks now use collaboration software to streamline communications, address concerns, and communicate internally through all available channels.

Benefits Of A Help Desk Ticket System For Customer Service

If your company provides customer service to your customers, you probably know, at least in theory, what a help desk ticket system is. However, here is a brief explanation in case you don't. Help desk tickets are individual customer service cases. Every time you submit a new case, a ticket will be created and used to track all progress made toward solving your problem until it is finally resolved.

The help desk service ticket system helps automate the time-consuming and repetitive administrative tasks associated with managing customer service cases. Typically, it is linked to a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) database that stores all contact information.

There are many help desk ticket systems, but not all are the same. In particular, we like Agile CRM, which offers a complete set of customer support features and CRM and marketing automation capabilities all on one platform. It's also free, making it perfect for small businesses. Check out Agile CRM's free help desk suite. However, choosing the right solution for your needs requires a deep understanding of how such a system can help.

Here we delve deeper to reveal the benefits that help desk ticket systems offer our customer service presence.

1. Faster ticket resolution

Powerful help desk support services ticket system automates much of the day-to-day management of incoming help desk cases, giving your customer service team more time to focus on boarding and closing tickets . When an incoming ticket arrives, it is automatically entered into the system and routed to the appropriate support staff, with details about the case, such as the name of the customer, the product used, and the urgency of the ticket.

This is a workload that the team doesn't have to do, spend more time and energy addressing customer issues, spend more time entering data, and moving tickets throughout the process.

2. Reduction Of The Accumulation Of Tickets

If our customer service team can resolve more tickets in less time, we will begin to reduce ticket accumulation. This is important for two reasons. First, the longer a customer waits for a response from the support team, the less confident they will be in their ability to provide customer support. When customers have problems, they should solve them as soon as possible After all, you may be preventing them from doing their job, which is problematic for many reasons. The faster you can respond to them and fix the problem, the better they can use your product, which is important to recurring revenue.

Second, a large backlog of tickets creates a stressful environment for the customer service team. When sales reps are under pressure and stress, they are also unable to focus and impact their ability to effectively solve customer problems. Also, when under pressure, they are likely tied up or lacking in your customers, which has a detrimental effect on your brand reputation in the market.

3. Custom Support

Introducing a powerful help desk ticket system allows the team to focus personalized attention on customers with support issues. On the one hand, this is possible because automation frees up time. This allows you to spend conversations with your clients and provide a more personalized approach to support them. Customers can feel value if they can confirm that their support staff is really investing in their success and demonstrate it by taking the time to understand the problem over the phone. This increases brand loyalty and ensures long-term revenue growth.

On the other hand, if the help desk ticket system is linked to a CRM, or if it comes with a CRM like Agile CRM, the company can store a lot of information about individual contacts. This includes basic contact information such as name and address, purchase history, web browsing activities, your likes and interests. This level of knowledge for each client gives our support team a better understanding of who each client is and a more personal way of interacting with them.

4. Higher Quality Support

Some help desk ticket systems offer help desk groups. Help desk groups are a way to group customers into groups that share common attributes, such as using the same product or speaking the same language. Then you can assign specific support staff to those groups. For example, if Group 1 is using Product A, you can basically assign an expert for Product A to a group that focuses only on Product A. Then, if Group 2 uses Product B, it will only support that person. that is an expert in that product. This enables you to provide your clients with specialized support staff who are familiar with solving the problems they often face.

This has two secondary benefits. First, tickets close faster because support staff doesn't have to escalate the ticket to a more detailed teammate. Second, it provides an excellent level of support, which improves customer satisfaction. It is nothing more annoying than calling customer service and having someone who does not understand the problem or how to fix it. So look for a help desk ticket system that offers help desk groups.

5. Continuous Performance Improvement

A valuable help desk ticket system provides metrics and analysis of team performance. Often these metrics can be viewed in a central dashboard, providing valuable insight at a glance. In this way, you can monitor metrics such as closed tickets, average time to solve a problem, etc. This lets you know that someone on your team is falling behind at work and can address the problem before it escalates further.

Help desk analysis provides transparency in your support team's efforts, helps identify process bottlenecks and other issues, and corrects their course accordingly. They also give the team an element of responsibility. If something goes wrong, the system report can easily tell you why it happened. So, before you buy, make sure your potential systems report is robust.

The 5 Most Important Help Desk KPIs

Help desk discussions usually take one of two directions. Discuss "soft" best practices (such as pitching your company's culture tone) or help desk software delve into the best rabbit holes.

Arguably both are important, but these best practices and software tools cannot compensate for the help desk service lack of understanding of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

A Help Desk KPIs are the most important measurable results that show the success and failure of customer service activities. Without them, we cannot be completely sure what is working. And by choosing the right KPIs from the help desk, successful customer teams can get rid of strange items and focus on what matters most.

Top 5 KPIs from Customer Support Help Desk to Monitor

These are the most important customer service metrics you need to track.

1. ·         First response
2. ·         Rate of resolution
3. ·         Agent utilization
4. ·         Customer satisfaction
5. ·         Cost per ticket

These help desk KPIs are important from a management perspective, as they provide insight into the effectiveness of the systems and processes used. Being able to see if your efforts are aligned with the company's goals and values is the best of all.

Similarly, this view your efforts feature help desk support services managers keep pace, hold agents accountable, identify areas for improvement / training, and drive growth and progress. Let's take a closer look.

First Response

Put yourself in the position of the end user. Imagine this:

When you send a fine or make a complaint phone call, the respondent will refer you to another "more appropriate" person. Before you know it, there are long wait times, huge email threads, and chaotic communication exchanges.

How do you feel next time You are more likely to be discouraged when there is another problem / inquiry / complaint and less likely to call back. As a result, you lose confidence in your company's ability to handle problems efficiently. How likely are you to stay with them if they can't help you reliably?

The good news for the help desk team is that not only is the initial response measured, it is actually very easy to measure.

Rate Of Resolution

This is one of the indicators that you cannot escape. Often user satisfaction is directly and strongly related to resolution, especially within the first exchange.

Each subsequent exchange can reduce user satisfaction by approximately 15%, according to a survey by the SQM Group.

Everyone knows that leaving tickets open is out of the question, but it's easy to neglect.

Again, you can use the help desk tool to track this KPI and see how many complaints were resolved on the first exchange, how many escalations were, and how many times the ticket was reopened.

Knowing the resolution rate according to a certain standard allows you to take immediate action when a decrease is observed.

Agent Utilization

Agent utilization is probably the best indicator of productivity, but it is not as easy to assess as the first answer. The following is a well established measurement method.

If your agents reach 70-80% utilization, you should probably pay attention to rotation. Be careful with this KPI to avoid compromising the cost per ticket or employee retention.

It is important to remember that you need to maintain optimal agent utilization, but doing so by trying to maximize all agents will increase costs due to agent rotation. There is no doubt that you will.

Customer Satisfaction

Nothing beats this help desk KPI. The whole team unites. You may think that everything is working properly, your system is efficient, and your agents are productive, but your customers may disagree.

The point is that the customer finally has to be satisfied.

They should be given a way to evaluate and consider their service. However, to assess the overall value of this KPI, you must first measure the relationship between the number of surveys sent to your customers and the number of completed surveys.

The volume of customer feedback surveys must be large enough to produce definitive results. For early-stage startups, obtaining a sufficient number of completed surveys can take some time. Be patient and keep this KPI in mind.

When we draw a statistically significant number of customers, what is known here as "customer satisfaction" consists of many different KPIs:

• ·         Promoter's net score
• ·         Customer satisfaction
• ·         Social emotions

Cost Per Ticket

This is a metric that you can use to determine the overall performance of your help desk service. Many data inputs calculate this.

The cost per ticket includes at least the following calculations:

1. ·         Agent salary and benefits
2. ·         Manager / Manager wages and benefits
3. ·         Technical expenses used for help desk software, computers, etc.
4. ·         Communication fee
5. ·         Installation cost

Most of the costs here are from agents and other agents. Therefore, monitoring agent use is as important as monitoring cost per ticket.

Even if the cost per ticket is higher than the industry average, it does not necessarily mean that you are doing a bad job. This may also be an indication that the quality of service is above average. Balancing quality and cost is certainly important here.

In general, the cost per KPI ticket is a good way to determine the efficiency of processes and agents. However, as mentioned at the beginning, it is important to balance this focus on the "hard" metric with the immeasurable "soft" aspect that is important in helping the desktop succeed.

Last Words On Help Desk KPI

Continuous tracking and monitoring of help desk performance is an absolute requirement for success and achieving higher levels of customer service.

The list above is not a complete list of help desk KPIs, but it is a great place to start. You can add other metrics to this list based on your primary customer service goals. Please note the following notes:

5 Ways To Keep Your IT Help Desk Relevant

Help desks are changing as technology evolves and users get used to choosing and supporting their systems. Use these insider tips to maximize the productivity of your help desk and make sure it remains an important part of your business.

The outsourced service desk quickly inform you that you can reduce costs and improve service by providing a more efficient and responsive 24x7 infrastructure. This can be quite true and many problems can be solved remotely through an externally managed system. However, there is nothing better than a practical engineer who can work face to face. A failed laptop, for example, is much easier for a technician if it's immediately available to troubleshoot, diagnose, and / or replace, rather than providing employees with a phone, timeouts, and the shipped system. I can support you. With this in mind, perhaps the ideal future help desk is a hybrid of staff on and off site.

Whether local, outsourced, or hybrid, these 5 operating practices help keep your help desk relevant and aligned with your business priorities.

Streamline The Ticketing Process

Guided tours, pop-ups, quick questions, and unexpected visitors can quickly overwhelm local help desk staff. The same applies to calls to external technicians.

All successful help desk service have a ticketing system that allows users to login and track problems. Some ticket systems are more successful than others. The good ones offer the possibility of opening a ticket by email, web portal or other electronic means (of course, if everything else fails, the phone should also be an option).

Keep Informed Users

Any planned changes to your company's systems or services must be notified in advance. This keeps you informed and protects your IT department from the "change [X] or install [Y]" conflict. You have the right to know what changes have been made and how they affect your activity.

Standard "maintenance" email templates help ease the process. I explain to you that the Windows patch will be deployed at 2 a.m. on Friday or that the company's proxy server will restart at 5 p.m. to avoid Internet access (which is good for productivity!).

Provide sufficient staff

For a help desk to be effective, it needs the right ratio of technicians and staff. The exact ratio of optimal services depends on your organization and how you are using technology. The factors that affect the relationship are:

• ·         Does the user have administrator rights on his machine?
• ·         Do you employ a significant number of remote workers?
• ·         Are you using different software / versions / operating systems?
• ·         Do employees choose and buy their own devices for IT support?
• ·         Do employees report only major issues, such as when the system stops working?

An affirmative answer to the above will lead to more support calls and more personal.

Train To Meet Your Current Needs

You can keep your technical-user relationship high by having enough training in the technologies your technicians support. Learning on the job is a valuable skill that benefits most, if not all, IT professionals. But this is not the only training they receive. As the saying goes, being alerted beforehand means doing it beforehand. Is Windows 8.1 at your company? Make sure your help desk is familiar with the nuances and changes that are currently mandatory for businesses, such as the Windows 8.1.1 update. Would you like to introduce a new Cisco VPN client? Check with your support staff for support on numerous operating systems and network environments (Linux or Mac OS X, home over broadband, Wi-Fi, 3G / 4G mobile networks, etc.).

 Focus On New Developments And Trends.

Helpdesk technicians need more than they are doing today. They should also have the opportunity to focus on new technologies and develop positive thinking by studying what's around the corner (as a measurable goal sponsored by companies) too)

This not only helps engineers respond quickly to new developments, but also helps them plan for those developments by providing useful information on technical changes to be made. Cloud storage is secure enough to finally pass these stringent regulations. Has a new portable device been invented with a new lost tracking method? Will wearable technology help reduce employee smartphones quickly (or will it help employees reduce the amount of money they spend on personal technology to get the job done for the company)? The ability to explore first can help in the search and implementation of new ideas.

7 Ways To Improve It Help Desk Performance Today

Is your IT help desk lacking in performance? Did you have a complaint?

The secret to making a boat correct is to act quickly, purposefully, and positively. With proper planning, teams can make small adjustments to the process to improve performance over time.

Here are seven ways to improve the performance of your help desk service.

1. Collect The Appropriate Metrics

Sometimes just saying "people complain" or "I hear they have some problems" is not enough. Data collection and analysis take place here.

Did you notice a drop in service level? Did customer satisfaction ratings plummet? Will the resolution time be prolonged or will the retention time drag up? Has the number of first-touch resolutions decreased?

Before contacting your help desk support services, make sure you have the actual data to back up your assumptions. Things may not be as serious as you might think, or maybe worse than you bargained for, but it's a good idea to know exactly where you are before mapping out.

2. Set Well-Defined Goals

Once you have these metrics, you can create goals on where to put performance. Are the first tactile resolution numbers in the 60th and 70th percentiles? Consider setting an 80% goal.

It is a good idea to identify your team's current position and the metrics the team must meet to improve.

 3. Collection Of Appropriate Performance Feedback

In addition to keeping track of metrics, consider collecting feedback from employees (internal customers). This information can be used to address the specific problems mentioned (such as bad attitudes or poor communication skills), but can also be used to increase morale.

A simple customer satisfaction survey (CSAT) can be very helpful in measuring employee satisfaction with your service desk.

4. Establish A Service Catalog And A Self-Service Portal

If the service we provide is clear and the employee can get help when and when they need it, their problems are reduced and their satisfaction increases.

The easy-to-use service catalog is an ideal place for customers to order the hardware and services they need without spending valuable time calling the help desk. The self-service portal allows employees to get the answers they need over the phone without spending time with a help desk worker.

By reducing the number of calls and emails to the help desk outsourcing companies, technicians are always informed of incoming requests without delay.

5 Provide Adequate Training To Help Workers

A properly trained IT technician can solve more problems and resolve them faster without having to escalate the problem frequently. This enables employees to improve their internal level of customer service by not having to wait for emails and callbacks from top-level service providers.

Another great strategy is to provide employees with ITIL certification training. The ITIL framework ensures that companies provide a consistent and predictable level of service, based on industry best practices.

If you have a technical service provider who understands the importance of ITIL, you can use these tools to maximize your experience.

6. Investment In New Technologies.

Do they provide the latest technology to technicians and employees? Outdated technology slows down the work process and makes team members less flexible in handling specific situations.

Now you can automate many of your IT service management operations, such as AI-powered self-service portals. Other AI-related technologies, such as chatbots, free up time for everyone involved and allow staff members to handle only the most urgent situations.

7. Establish A System Of Rewards And Penalties.

What can IT expect if IT staff achieve their goals? What should they expect if they don't achieve their goals, either personally or as a team? Compensation and liability are effective strategies to improve the productivity of any work team.

Make sure the rewards are worth it, and that the measure of accountability is realistic and communicated to team members in advance.

Finally, here is a new plan to improve performance time. True impact cannot be measured overnight, so we continually monitor measure and improve.