13 Best Practices For Implementing The IT Help Desk

A key challenge for many growing companies is the growing challenge of daily IT in parallel with additional jobs, offices and other expansions.

If the Internet goes down unexpectedly, applications freeze, or your laptop stops working, you need "resources" to receive and resolve your complaint.

That resource is the help desk service. This is an asset that keeps every employee up and running solving daily IT problems. In this post, we'll take a look at what the IT help desk needs to effectively address the IT support needs of your business.

13 Best practices for implementing the IT Help Desk

1. Use The Appropriate Help Desk Software System

IT help desks should use ITSM (IT Service Management) software (BMC Helix, ServiceNow, etc.) to drive operations. ITSM enables helpdesks to receive service or incident tickets, manage assets, and report ticket resolution rates and other metrics.

With a properly configured ITSM suite, IT helpdesks can manage large numbers of tickets and can use the self-service portal and other features to reduce call volume and control IT support costs.

The challenge is to properly configure the ITSM suite and make sure you have enough resources to maintain the real overhead of the service desk (salary, equipment, etc.).

2. Hiring The Right People

Appropriate staff should be assigned to the help desk support services. One way to guarantee this is to obtain HDI (Help Desk Institute) certification. Doing so will ensure that your service agents work with help desk best practices, especially from a customer service and asset management perspective.

3. Construction and implementation of the service level agreement (SLA)

IT help desks must operate in accordance with service level agreements (SLAs). Under the SLA, you can ask the help desk team to resolve a minimum percentage of tickets, answer calls, support tickets within a set period of time, and other requirements. SLAs allow you to take responsibility for your desktop and help you work effectively.

4. Maintain sufficient capacity

You must ensure that your service table has sufficient capacity to meet your needs. This means not only enough people to support the volume of calls / tickets, but also the ability to accommodate users / clients in different time zones or during non-business hours and holidays.

5. Use the automatic ticket system

A properly configured ITSM suite includes automatic ticket capabilities. However, the idea behind this is much broader. You should consider automating as many low-value, manual tasks as possible to free up agents to solve IT problems.

6. Develop a specialized help desk group

In some cases, you may need a dedicated help desk group to focus on or focus on a specific set of applications or IT issues. For example, most of your teams use specific applications for their daily work, or they have a critical IT system that they want to prioritize for support. The idea is for the right people to work on the ticket so you don't waste time climbing.

7. Use a pre-built answer

Going back to the automation point we created earlier, the goal behind the pre-created answer is to free help desk staff from wasting time on tedious tasks. When someone asks for help, the ITSM suite should generate autoresponders whenever possible.

You can go one step further by combining your answer template with self-help support. For example, direct users to a self-help portal or frequently asked questions to see if they can solve the problem themselves.

8. Available in multiple contact channels

You should be able to contact the help desk using live chat, phone, email, and many other means. The key is to give IT help maximum accessibility.

9. Promote knowledge / experience

Service agents must be able to broaden their knowledge base. You don't want to have a situation where your desk needs to escalate to a higher level representative to solve a particular problem. The ideal approach is to equip your entire desk with the knowledge and tools to solve the problem.

10. Aim to solve the first contact

To minimize downtime and confusion, the service desk should focus on solving the ticket on the first contact. You may need to provide a significant amount of training to each member of the help desk staff.

This has a high initial cost, but can pay off in the long run by reducing the operational impact of IT problems. Additionally, First Contact Resolution (FCR) helps increase customer / end-user satisfaction.

11. Cases resolved in a row

Help desks should follow up on closed / resolved cases using surveys or comment forms. This is an opportunity for the help desk to gather information to evaluate staff and improve the process.

12. Track help desk performance

SLAs should request helpdesk to track performance on key metrics. Especially:

• Ticket resolution rate;
• Time to settle a ticket.
• Average pickup / ticket response time;
• Percentage of tickets still open / unresolved after a certain period of time.
• FCR rate;
• Number of escalations to level 2 and level 3 support.
• Other.

By visualizing each of these areas, the help desk identifies gaps in the knowledge base and the process. Then you can improve it with training, ITSM configuration work, or other methods to generate additional cost and time savings.

13. Satisfy Help Desk Employees

Fatigue and stress should not affect your employees. To do this, you must always have enough agents to handle the capacity. Additionally, bonuses can be configured for performance reviews to encourage better personal and desktop output.