7 Reasons Your Company Should Have Helpdesk Ticketing Software

For many federal, state, and local government entities, the help desk is the backbone of IT operations. In reality, because of its cross-functional character, the help desk has a direct influence on productivity and is a critical component of an agency’s ability to address stakeholder demands.

Managers, on the other hand, are struggling to guarantee that their help desks are running at peak performance due to increasingly complicated IT infrastructures.

A seven-point checklist will assist IT, managers, in ensuring that their help desks provide excellent service while also increasing efficiency.

1. Establish The Proper Framework

An IT help desk’s effectiveness may be considerably improved by properly arranging it. Create many levels or layers for support desks. Tier 0 of a three-tier help desk, for example, might be a self-service portal, with tiers 1, 2, and 3 consisting of technicians with progressively higher levels of expertise and ability.

Issues can be routed to the appropriate tier depending on the intricacy of the issue in a ticket. IT managers should also build up a route for escalations and inter-level communication.

2. Create a Queue And Allocate Requests To It.

Most help desks prioritize tickets, with higher-priority activities taking up the majority of technicians’ productive time. Other tickets may go unattended until a technician answers, resulting in longer turnaround times and service-level agreement breaches.

Keep track of requests by queuing tickets on a first-come, first-served basis and using automatic assignment models like round-robin and load balancing. Ticket allocations can also be subjected to priority-based business criteria.

3. Conduct Surveys of End-Users

IT managers should review essential success aspects including processes, personnel, and technology to properly evaluate the help desk’s effectiveness. Technicians should be judged on their responsiveness and speed of ticket resolution; procedures should be judged on how easy it is to file a ticket, contact a technician, and receive help; and technology should be judged on how easy it is to communicate.

Send a survey to users after their tickets are closed to collect feedback on specific tickets. Conduct annual or semi-annual surveys for larger-scale input.

4. Provide Self-Service Options To End-Users

Users frequently meet minor and repeated difficulties that they can handle themselves, which relieves the IT help desk crew of part of their responsibilities.

Create a self-service site that gives information and solutions as well as a service catalog where end-users can quickly see and select the services they require to assist them to solve their own problems. A self-service portal may also be used to send company-wide notifications to keep users up to date on any issues, planned maintenance, and so on.

5. Improve The Efficiency Of Everyday Chores

Periodic chores such as replacing a printer’s toner or doing system checks are frequently performed by IT support desks. There are two approaches to handle these tasks:

• Routine task tickets are produced at a pre-determined time and assigned to a technician.
• Routine and basic operations, such as password reset requests, can be automated, allowing personnel to focus on higher-priority complaints

6. Create reports with key performance indicators that are specific to your needs

For all stakeholders, one all-encompassing report will not be enough to assess help desk performance. Create focused reports and, as a starting point, track the following:

• First Contact Resolution: The proportion of tickets that are resolved after the first contact with the user.
• SLA Violations: The number of tickets where the response or resolution fell short of the SLA.
• Backlog Tickets: The proportion of unresolved new tickets.
• Mean Ticket Resolution Time: The average time it takes to resolve a ticket.
• User Satisfaction: The percentage of users that are satisfied with the assistance they have received.

Using scorecards to provide those indicators is a good method to keep track of help desk performance at a higher level, and it’s especially valuable for strategists and decision-makers.

7. Improve Communication And Collaboration

In rare situations, technicians will speak with the requester extensively. It’s possible that technicians will spend a lot of time moving between programs and composing emails.

Using a help desk technology that sends and receives emails from within the request helps remove this overhead. The use of canned language for common answers and resolutions will minimize the need to compose emails manually even further.

Conclusion

IT support desks are now seen as value enhancements rather than cost centers by government entities. Agency help desks have had to keep up with the growth of developing and increasingly complicated technologies in order to fulfill the demands of stakeholders. The suggestions above can help you build up a successful IT help desk that adds value to your agency’s users.