Providing a great Customer Experience for your IT helpdesk users is as important for your employees as it is for your customers.
Whether you are dealing with internal users or external clients, the people you support have high expectations that need to be met as effectively and efficiently as possible.
The rapid adoption of cloud-based solutions and the continuing consumerisation of IT means many organisations struggle to keep their employees up-to-date and tech-savvy; this means the role of the internal IT support desk is more vital than ever.
So, here’s a definitive checklist of the four fundamental components of great IT support.
1. Define your service standards – and stick to them!
Better support is easily defined, by getting the help and guidance you need, when you want it. The ‘best’ support outcome increasingly means resolving users’ issues in the first point of contact, or if that’s not possible, providing a solution within a timeframe that is acceptable to the user.
To achieve this, it is vital to ensure that IT helpdesk staff are given the training they need to keep their skillset up-to-date and that they have access to the tools they need to resolve enquiries quickly and efficiently.
Equally important is keeping the customer informed, so that they know their issue is being worked on; if they don’t know it’s being taken care of, it is easy to lose the faith. Finally, delivering on promises, providing updates, and fixes according to the agreed schedule are the final steps to great support success.
2. Use remote support to speed up service delivery
Problems with IT occur frequently, often multiple times a day. These issues dent the user’s productivity, and it is the help desk team who take the brunt of user frustration for every single delay.
By improving the efficiency of your help desk processes you can keep your employees happy while taking the pressure of the help desk team
There are useful ways to provide faster support:
- Save time, whilst also reducing desk-side visits, by using a remote support solution to solve problems with personal IT. Rather than the user’s interpretation of this information being recycled, remote support solutions can solve the problems in a clear and informative way.
- Pre-deploying remote support solutions, connecting immediately, and fixing the issue as soon as the user logs a call will streamline the whole process and make the delivery of support much faster.
- Share, share, share: keeping the rest of the IT support team updated with each other’s experiences, and sharing knowledge that can benefit common user problems. Eventually, the team will all be working to the fastest method of fixing each different problem.
3. Deploy smarter support tactics
By deploying resources more intelligently, the quality of the support immediately improves. Make sure your help desk system allows you to route calls, emails, or instant messages directly to the assigned person, matching up the right support skills with the users who will benefit most from their specific expertise.
Properly prioritise the urgent fixes from the ones that can wait, and introduce specific categories to determine and identify them. Allocate team resources intelligently, analysing data to address peak times.
Deploy an end user portal, allowing customers to track the progress of their issues, saving them time and effort chasing updates. Combine support tools so that all of the team’s resources are in one place, increasing the efficiency of the IT help desk service delivery, whilst also reducing costs.
4. Make the most of your IT helpdesk resources
It sounds obvious, but it is vital to have a strong support system in place to avoid wasting the time of your helpdesk staff and allow technical experts to focus their time and effort on solving customer issues at a fast and thorough pace.
Streamline the delivery of the support by automating escalation and allocation automatically wherever possible, as soon as calls come in.
There are lots of quick wins that can improve job satisfaction for your helpdesk team and deliver a better Customer Experience. For example, you can programme your support tools to identify and group together similar issues from users, so that the same member of the support team can work on and close several user calls simultaneously – making your team much stronger.