How can you improve your IT service desk? The ability to access IT support quickly and easily is essential for your users, whether they are employees, customers or partners. If your IT service desk is unavailable, or hard to reach, it can have a negative impact on productivity, revenue generation and reputation. Therefore, if user satisfaction rates and ticket resolution times are not meeting the grade, it’s time to make some improvements.
Here we share x5 IT service desk improvements that deliver positive results.
IT service desk improvements – try these…
- Improve self-service options
An effective way to improve your IT service desk is to reduce the number of tickets raised. This has the benefit of reducing your IT support team’s workload so they can focus on resolving other tickets and also work on more strategic projects. Improving your self-serve options is the first step, by giving users solutions to resolve the issue for themselves.
Review your knowledge banks and troubleshooting guides to see whether they can be improved and updated. Are there common problems that a self-service option could address? Many people are happy to fix a problem for themselves if it means they can get a faster resolution, so make sure users know about self-serve options and how they can help them.
- Listen to your users
Customer satisfaction rates improve, alongside positive outcomes, when service desk analysts really listen to your end users. It’s important to identify how significant the issue is to the end user, however low a priority it is to your IT support team. That way they can be reassured that they are being listened to, that the issue is being taken seriously and that the service desk analyst understands them. That doesn’t mean that their ticket is escalated, unless it is clearly a higher priority than you thought, but it does mean that the user has more confidence that the service desk will deal with it appropriately. Invest in training to ensure your service desk team are really listening to what users are saying.
- Outsource 1st line tickets
1st line tickets can be very time consuming for an in-house IT department. They distract your team from doing other more value-adding work, and are also difficult to manage when you require out-of-hours cover. Outsourcing 1st line tickets – such as call logging, password resets, account unlocks, distribution list changes/creations, closing sessions, clearing print queues, user training, basic desktop support, basic hardware issues and third party triage – can deliver significant improvements to your service desk. It can also be a much more cost effective way of providing basic IT support.
- Collect user feedback
Without feedback from users it’s difficult to know how to improve the performance of your service desk. Even if you can’t always act on improvement-based feedback, you can increase customer satisfaction rates just by replying and acknowledging the user’s input. Explain that you’re grateful for their input and outline what steps can or have been taken to address the issue raised.
When you can act on feedback, and especially if you see trends developing where users give very similar improvement-based feedback, act on it! Then make sure you inform all parties of the improvements that have been put in place so they know you take their feedback seriously.
- Go above and beyond
Service Level Agreements set out what users can expect from your service desk, but what about doing more? When a user receives more value, their whole perception of your IT support team changes from a ‘necessary evil’ to a department that’s genuinely there to help. Promote a culture of delivering value. Instead of just logging tickets, encourage service desk analysts to think about how they may be able to help outside of pre-defined procedures. For example, if a user has an issue printing an important document, as well as logging the ticket and booking an engineer to repair the printer could they help the user get that document printed by other means?
It may not be easy to drive improvements to your IT service desk when you have limited resources and budget. Implementing self-serve solutions, having the time to really listen to users and collate feedback, and going above and beyond when time is short and tickets are piling up isn’t always feasible. However, you can implement these improvements by outsourcing to a specialist provider. They have the resources and infrastructure needed to improve the performance of your service desk, and will also free up your IT department’s time to focus on delivering more value in other areas.
Download our guide to learn more about driving IT service desk efficiencies…
