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.