How do you manage your outsourced service desk?

In addition to prioritizing tickets, there are several other ways to optimize your IT team and ensure that your customers receive the support they need. Managing your outsourced service desk involves coordinating multiple metrics, defining goals, and maintaining employee satisfaction. Below are some best practices to help your team maximize its potential.

Build A Superior Team And Incorporate Your Feedback. Each IT service team is as good as the sum of the team members, their experience, and their skills. Training inexperienced staff can be risky, as they may choose to move into higher-paying positions once they have gained experience. Hiring experienced IT staff can generate higher salaries, but eliminates the need for costly and lengthy training processes. It also helps keep existing customers and increases customer satisfaction. Check to see if you have the tools you need and request regular feedback to make sure your team is happy and maximized.

Don't Overload Your Team. Excessive late tickets may indicate that the ticket management system needs improvement. In some cases, you may be able to reduce your delay by further automating the ticketing process. Overdue work is also a sign that IT equipment is not large enough to handle the workload and needs to be expanded. Recognizing these signs can go a long way in improving employee satisfaction, and therefore customer satisfaction.

Include A Service Level Agreement. Most companies use service level agreements (SLAs) to measure IT service problems and improvements. SLAs establish the basic terms of support services. They indicate an agreement between you and your client; for example, they specify the maximum amount of waiting time allowed for a good quality of service to be considered. It is important to remember that SLAs are different from the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) used to track performance. To derive and implement SLAs, you need to seek constructive customer feedback and discuss how you can improve customer satisfaction.

Improve The Customer Experience. As you know, customer retention not only solves problems effectively, it also depends on quality of service and customer experience. Understanding how to track customer experience can be difficult, especially if customer concerns don't align with SLAs. Analyze the data to understand the difference between good and bad customer experiences. These differences can range from poor communication with individual agents to long latencies. In addition to examining existing data, you can track your customer experience by asking customers directly. Provide an easily accessible customer portal and encourage customers to comment on their experiences.

Monitor The Data, But Focus On Actionable Insights. Tracking KPIs is essential to keep your help desk running smoothly. However, the amount of metrics available can be huge. Volume of tickets received, response rate, customer satisfaction with the service: all these factors provide information on the effectiveness of the system and the performance of service personnel. Comparing team performance and SLAs can be difficult, but you can start by setting a baseline and looking for variations. Investigate factors that can increase latency and customer satisfaction, and take precautions when possible.

Go Ahead And Celebrate Your Progress. Set clear performance goals for what your team wants to achieve and share those goals with your team. Make sure they know you are monitoring their performance. Once the team achieves the defined goals, ask the group to celebrate this progress. Keeping everyone informed will ensure that service personnel are aware of their performance. Then they will probably start thinking about actively reaching the team's goals.

Operating a support desk that provides high-level service requires constant supervision and regular coordination. SolarWinds® MSP Manager is an excellent management system that enables organizations to automate ticket management processes and ensure that IT services personnel have the support they need. With MSP Manager, you can generate support tickets from email details, track KPIs, such as the time spent on individual tickets, and view updates and alerts in a pan.