Uninterrupted operation of software, hardware, and network access means the absence of financial and often reputational risks for business. While the company is small, user service requests can be tracked in mail or work chats. As the organization grows, the number of requests will increase, and there will be a time when, due to manual handling of requests, IT support will no longer be able to provide quality service.
An IT helpdesk service for the IT department is necessary to prevent the jeopardization of the company’s processes. Let’s consider how it can eliminate user request loss and solve other typical problems within the IT department and at the company level as a whole.
Problems at the IT Team Level
The performance of the entire department depends on the efficiency of each employee. Help desk IT helps people cope with tasks faster and avoid mistakes.
Loss of Service Requests.
A request may fall out of the IT employee’s field of vision at the stage of entering it into the work plan, which especially often happens when registering requests from several channels manually.
The help desk supports automatic registration of requests via a personal account, email, and messengers. If a request is received by phone, the IT employee can use the request template to quickly record the details of the incident or service request and immediately assign the performer.
The specialist assigned to it will receive a notification as soon as the request is entered into a single system. For example, through a mobile application, you can track the receipt of requests, even without being at your workplace, and immediately begin to resolve it.
Missed Deadlines
The scheduled time for completing requests may be exceeded for various reasons. For example, there are no fixed agreements, priorities are set manually, and there are no timely reminders about the approaching deadline.
Working with IT help desk systems begins with concluding a service level agreement (SLA). This document contains rules for calculating the time needed to complete a request depending on the type of service, its urgency, and its criticality for business processes. Thus, the request’s deadline and priority relative to others are set automatically. As the deadline approaches, the responsible IT employee will receive a reminder by email, a notification in a mobile application, or a browser, depending on the specified settings.
Poor Performance of Work
Even experienced specialists make mistakes, but newcomers are more prone to them. Inexperienced employees can be assigned to perform typical IT Services or for the initial stages of work.
If a typical task consists of several stages, then the system’s checklist functionality will be useful. This will help perform all actions in the correct sequence and ensure that nothing is forgotten. Checklist templates will also be useful for newcomers, such as for classifying and diagnosing incidents.
Too Many Standard Requests
If a detailed knowledge base is maintained in the help desk, users will be able to handle the simplest tasks, such as installing software or setting up mail, on their own and not wait for a specialist.
A link to the relevant instructions can be offered to users when they fill out an application in their personal account or added by an IT specialist to a comment in an already registered request.
Problems at the Company Level
The work of the IT department affects the entire company’s activity, so it is important to organize a simple system of control and analysis of indicators and automate the department’s main business processes. Help Desk tools allow you to eliminate difficulties along the way.
Low Transparency of the IT Department
With the help desk system, the company’s management will have access to full information about the department’s internal processes and will be able to evaluate their effectiveness.
For example, kanban boards visualize employees’ workloads: how many requests are in progress, how many have been resolved today, and how many new ones have arrived. The labor cost management function helps evaluate the labor intensity of solving each request and understand what determines employees’ workloads.
Low Team Productivity
Automation of typical tasks will help to increase the efficiency of the entire department. For example, for a new employee to start working, it is necessary to provide equipment with specific characteristics, configure software, and issue access to corporate systems. You will not have to create tasks manually and track the entire process step by step; the system itself will launch the sequence of necessary actions.
Difficulties with Work Planning
Implementation of new IT solutions and transformation of current processes, for example, transferring a database to a cloud environment, can become a simpler process with Help Desk.
Thus, the change management function includes developing a software implementation plan, accounting for affected IT assets and services, stage-by-stage approval of the progress and cost of work, and, if necessary, establishing a connection with the reason for implementing changes.
Ill-considered IT Infrastructure Management
The basis of competent management of the entire infrastructure is the accounting of IT assets – the collection and storage of information about all tangible and intangible components that are under the department’s control.
In the help desk system, you can not only maintain a list of assets, but also establish relationships between requests, for example, for troubleshooting with certain accounting units.
In addition, regulations for the performance of scheduled maintenance work can be established for each accounting unit. Together with incident registration, this allows for comprehensive work to minimize disruptions in the functioning of the IT infrastructure.
Conclusion
Manual management of the IT department can cause significant difficulties. Therefore, it is much more profitable to use the Help Desk. This tool allows you to build optimal efficiency of work and control of results. The work of the IT department can be optimized both at the team level and the entire company through automation. For this purpose, the help desk system has special tools and settings. You can flexibly customize the set of necessary options and change it as needed.
