Contact us anytime to know more — Kuldeep K., Founder & CEO CISIN
To enhance help desk agent productivity, having an ideal digital workspace that provides stability, reliability, and access is critical.
Furthermore, IT departments must provide efficient technical support so employees and organizations can successfully meet their KPIs. We present ten tips for running a practical service desk and the necessary tools to do it effectively.
Your business results from hours-long efforts spent creating value and reliability for customers, crafting your brand to reflect quality, and your transactions go as smoothly as planned with customers happy with what they purchase, leading to referrals based on positive experiences that leave everyone smiling.
Your trades should run seamlessly if everything runs as intended - this way, too, you will receive positive feedback on the work you perform and praise from them in turn!
How will your company deal with problems that require extra assistance? Even when businesses do their best, customers may become disgruntled due to technical errors or miscommunication requiring special consideration.
How you respond when someone contacts your business could make the difference between an angry, dissatisfied consumer and one who remains loyal.
Why Is Technical Support Important?
Customer support can be complex, yet essential in any successful business.
If a client calls your tech support line, this could indicate something is amiss between themselves and you - this could have happened due to incorrect actions taken by them, business mistakes made during interactions between staff members or random events occurring - however, chances are good they have already become dissatisfied with whatever experience has ensued, and customer satisfaction must always come first for business's success; so make sure their needs are heard.
Negative experiences tend to stick in customers' memories longer than positive ones; an unpleasant first impression has more of an effect than its opposite, potentially having severe repercussions for your business if your customers leave unsatisfied.
But your company can turn it around by showing how committed they are to providing superior client experience. In that case, clients may remember your service fondly and come back.
By sharing their expertise with those in their social network or other businesses, sharing customers will generate positive word-of-mouth marketing for your company and show that customer satisfaction is one of its primary goals - potentially even drawing in more clients.
For this strategy to work successfully, your business must adhere strictly to certain best practices.
You Need To Make Minimal Effort To Seek Help
Before they can speak with an employee of your business, customers must know how they can reach you. Your systems should determine the methods available; these should be easily identifiable to customers and displayed prominently throughout your website in different spots - either directly or by links leading the user to contact pages; you should have these contact details available in menu bars, headers or footers.
Email links must either open in their customers' preferred email service provider or integrate a message form directly onto the web page.
Mobile users should see prominent phone numbers that enable them to make calls now; chat assistance hours of availability should also be posted prominently - remembering multiple avenues can ease customers' reaching out.
Resolve Issues Immediately
To provide better customer experiences when responding to requests for assistance, your response time or an estimate for resolving problems must be quick.
Resolution times tend to be faster if your company offers online or phone-based IT support; chatbots can make customers feel heard while waiting for someone real agent to address complex queries; avoid deceiving customers into thinking you are talking directly with someone.
Response automation may give the illusion of instantaneous service; however, customers need to know when they will hear back from somebody, and support tickets must be answered on time to guarantee customer satisfaction.
Offer Self-service Help
Some issues can be handled without needing personal contact from your company's employees. A knowledge base that helps customers navigate your website and processes will reduce problems and improve customer experience.
Text or webinar-based tutorials could assist users through complex steps. Furthermore, an FAQ section would offer solutions to anticipated or prevalent technical problems. Provide clients with the tools needed to resolve their issues on their own to save time and personal contact with staff, giving the impression of trusting in customers to manage most straightforward matters themselves and permitting staff members to focus their support where needed.
You Can Invest In Your Support Team Members
IT staff who interact directly with customers must be equipped to create an excellent first impression, so specific vital considerations must be considered when leading such teams:
- Offer quality training: Communication abilities (people skills) are vitally important in all customer service positions and should be utilized when discussing technical problems with clients. IT solutions may be complex for some receivers of information; as a result, approaching such matters insensitively could create tension for all involved - the IT staff must learn how to listen actively and recognize problems quickly while diffusing situations when necessary.
- Stress accountability: Your initial interaction with customers should produce solutions. Suppose a team member cannot directly resolve an issue for a client. In that case, they must still attempt to locate and share solutions or remain in touch until an adequate person can explain their point. Do not force customers into repeating their problem multiple times through multiple transfers - create an environment where consumers expect solutions from the initial support agent they encountered.
- Provide your team with the necessary tools: People working directly with customers can offer solutions if your department is sufficiently trained. Remote assistive applications like screen-sharing can simplify communicating IT instructions and issues; give frontline workers autonomy in deciding if retention rewards should be provided or trust their judgment in which situations warrant such measures.
- Be clear about your expectations for the customer's experience: Ensure all IT team members understand your objectives for each interaction to ensure a seamless customer journey between employees. Customers should receive consistent experiences throughout their dealings with different members.
Data On Consumers Can Be Used Efficiently
Customer satisfaction will increase due to faster problem resolution times.
Support teams handling technical issues will greatly benefit from collecting and keeping up-to-date customer records. Support staff could search online accounts containing customer identifiers like email or cell phone numbers to search for customer details more efficiently and provide personalized interaction by directly addressing each individual by their name - this will create an unforgettable customer service experience and reinforce feelings of importance to all parties involved.
Provide your technical data, such as software or hardware used, to reduce the need for follow-up questions to understand a problem more quickly and accurately.
Including notes with support requests facilitates faster follow-up from team members for any ongoing issues; and avoids having customers repeat themselves repeatedly.
Engage In Social Media
Younger consumers and older customers alike increasingly use social media to contact companies. This trend can mainly be observed when customers feel their issue hasn't been solved adequately through traditional support channels; social media-enabled companies provide another means of venting concerns in this forum after traditional support methods fail.
Because all interactions on this public medium take place publicly, training on this form should include both team leaders or managers involved with user interaction and the support desk.
Measurement Support Efforts
Evaluation is crucial when employees interact directly with consumers; IT support should be included. It would be best if you established key performance metrics (KPIs) to measure the success of technical support services and reduce costs while improving customer experiences while improving staff performances - quantifiable elements include closing support tickets more rapidly or closing tickets faster as examples; you'll gain insight into strengths and weaknesses within your support team while gathering insights through CRM reports, social media analytics or website analytic reports.
Analyze The Data And Make Adjustments
Analyze the data you have amassed to spot trends and identify issues, then make necessary changes. An extended response time to support tickets might indicate problems in IT training or management practices or lack of help desk resources; then, once changes have been implemented and measured their effects again after implementation to see their impact, repeat this process regularly so your customer interactions continue improving while responding effectively to technology advances.
All interactions may seem impossible to navigate, but they're an invaluable way to identify problems and win customers.
To make interactions positive for all involved, implement some best practices which make the customer feel valued while meeting their requirements - this way, the initial negative experience might even turn around. With proper implementation, more customers could become regulars within your circle of influence due to this positive interaction experience; you can measure customer support efforts' success by tracking improvements over time as well as the results of the support desk.
Want More Information About Our Services? Talk to Our Consultants!
Ten Tips For Improving The Service Of Your Customer Support Desk
People Are The Most Important Thing, Not Technology
Service desk managers and organizations tend to prioritize tools when setting up service desks, investing in advanced systems and software.
But the fundamental keystones of service desk success lie within its agents and users themselves - well-trained employees with motivation are more capable of providing tech support daily. They can more swiftly resolve tickets across the IT support spectrum.
Training Service Desk agents is essential to ensure they know about any problems your employees are encountering and how best to resolve them quickly and efficiently.
Ensure they're equipped with the tools needed to resolve these issues as soon as they arise quickly.
Gamification can help motivate staff. One such gamification approach could involve setting up a leaderboard that keeps count of tickets solved each week and awarding those at the top with company swag as incentives for doing well.
Gamification encourages employees to unleash their competitive side while inspiring productivity among employees.
Set Clear And Measurable KPIs, Goals, And Metrics
When setting service desk goals, ITSM metrics often focus on vanity metrics rather than actual performance measures of their service desks.
Such vanity measures often make an illusionary statement about their success. Still, they may need to reflect existing service delivery performance accurately.
Each day may bring numerous inquiries for service desk employees even when their experience at that desk may be less-than-stellar.
Metrics might demonstrate this activity: employees might frequently consult IT knowledge bases. Yet this might indicate they don't find answers there that answer their inquiries.
When setting goals and metrics, make sure they can be measured easily. Align these measurements with your organization's overall goals and vision rather than counting queries directly; calculate their response times and the percentage resolved upon first contact instead.
Self-Service Is The Focus
Establish your service desk so employees can use many of its services independently, using only limited resources and saving time by solving queries.
While complete self-service may not be achievable, some agents could be removed as self-service may remain helpful in meeting employee requests for services.
Employees need an easy way to request services. Create an IT service catalog that clearly outlines how employees should request services and provides all the relevant details to a service desk agent.
In contrast, employees can use self-service catalogs such as chatbots or automation to order them without speaking directly with agents. Chatbots or automation technologies could even relieve service desk technicians of some workload while assisting employees in discovering answers themselves.
Employee Feedback Is Essential
Employee feedback collection for your service desk should be essential to monitoring performance metrics, providing valuable insight into employee perception and how best to enhance it.
By receiving employee reviews on what employees think of the service desk experience and suggestions on how it could be improved further, employee insights may reveal what employees value in terms of its functionality or want to be changed.
Feedback can help demonstrate the efficacy of service desk agents and the system. When an agent receives consistently poor reviews from employees, this may indicate they require further training or that there could be something amiss in their workflow process.
Your employees may respond more readily to short surveys with yes/no or rate a ticket 1-10 questions rather than lengthy ones that ask them to describe conversations in depth, so you're more likely to get immediate and accurate feedback after answering each ticket than waiting days later for feedback to arrive in an email or questionnaire form.
Use A Plan For Continuous Improvement Of Service
Analyze data from your service desk to identify any bottlenecks. Modern service desks feature analytics dashboards with detailed data that reveal patterns and trends that impede its performance, so ensure all key stakeholders in your organization know about any problems they are encountering.
Once you've collected data about successes and failures at your service desk, create a plan for improving it. Consider changing ticket processing, upgrading IT knowledge bases, or training employees.
Most importantly, check the metrics and assess whether company goals align with those you set. Do these measurements reflect employee concerns from service desk agents or other stakeholders? Make any needed modifications according to the results.
Offer Omnichannel Support
Avoid confining your service desk to only phone support; providing employees with options like live chat and email can enhance its success.
Note that omnichannel service means more than delivering multiple ways for employees to contact the helpdesk; instead, it involves connecting these channels in an integrated fashion so an employee doesn't end up repeating themselves over and over when switching channels - for instance, contacting first via live chat and then switching over to phone support might require repeating all their information again and again.
Omnichannel support enables an agent to move between platforms seamlessly. For example, a remote desktop is one option, but once resolved may move onto live chat for further discussion.
Omnichannel support enhances employee experiences and offers valuable data regarding service desks and customer expectations.
Automate Your Service Desk
ITSM Automation will not only reduce agent workload at your Service Desk.
Still, it will ensure consistency across services provided, helping ensure all procedures are followed correctly and service quality stays maintained over time. Automating processes within a Service Desk ensures they're documented for review and compliance review purposes.
Automating ticket handling enables you to streamline the system for agents, assign agents to them quickly, send alerts on the progress of query resolution to employees as soon as it has occurred and automate sending emails and feedback forms for quick feedback once the issue is resolved.
Create A Strategy For Knowledge Management
As organizations expand and evolve, so must service desks. Their role may shift as new services are added or updated, and service desk technicians require quick and easy access to current data.
Therefore, a knowledge management strategy provides the answer.
Knowledge management strategies provide employees with easy access to one central source for any organization-related matter, making information sharing faster and ensuring employees always have access to up-to-date and pertinent data.
IT service desks should create plans to update and disseminate this data across their platforms - as can knowledge management strategies with an up-to-date knowledge base for employees.
Update Your Hardware And Software Regularly
An approach of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" about IT asset management can prove costly for an organization over time.
Routine hardware and software upgrades must occur to avoid creating downtime that could significantly impede business operations.
Monitor every device to ensure it has the most up-to-date firmware and security patches and firmware updates that could make a difference to its operation.
These updates must remain accessible as part of an effective cybersecurity defense strategy.
Asset management is an effective way of lowering total ownership costs. It ensures employees have all the tools needed to perform their duties effectively.
Failed devices or expired licenses can be particularly frustrating in remote settings and play an essential part in an organization's security strategy.
Develop A Relationship Of Trust With Executives And Key Decision-Makers In The Organization
Executives in an organization must comprehend the significance of service desk management to them and understand its capabilities.
To this end, its manager should work closely with executives to fully grasp their vision for this part of their operations; then relay that vision throughout.
Support from senior management is crucial when making changes or initiating initiatives from the service desk. Change management and executive sponsorship play an integral part in increasing the adoption rate of changes; they emphasize its significance among employees while motivating organizations.
Furthermore, improving Service Desk performance involves forging solid relationships with senior executives who understand its purpose and activities.
Read More: Optimizing Technology Services For Maximum Efficiency
Tools You Need To Run A Service Desk Efficiently
Service Desk Software
An effective service desk solution is of utmost importance; this enables you to streamline operations and decrease workload.
Modern service desk solutions come equipped with automation tools and data analytics capabilities, allowing them to automatically route tickets, notify of alerts or updates via alerts/updates sent automatically, collect data for analysis purposes and ultimately offer actionable insight for improving workflow processes.
Other features can also make the task of being a service desk supervisor easier. For example, Service Desk features modules to support gamification.
Furthermore, change management tools and cutting-edge automated features can all contribute towards making their lives simpler.
Asset Management Software
Fixing hardware and software problems is part of an IT service desk's day-to-day work for organizations' staff. IT Asset Management solutions offer one way of dealing with this challenge: maintaining an exhaustive inventory of all organization assets, such as laptops and PCs, as well as printers and scanners.
Asset tracking solutions like Insight allow businesses to keep an eye on the assets in their inventory, helping ensure business processes run efficiently while safeguarding devices in use within their organization.
What Is The Best Way To Establish Effective Technical Support Systems?
Documentation and communication serve as the final pieces in building this foundation. At the same time, loaner device programs allow any existing cracks to surface as environmental conditions controlled on school networks and buildings cannot be duplicated elsewhere; plus, the number of devices in a 1:1 program tends to multiply exponentially.
Professional Development Vs Training
Training is always the key to solving technical issues effectively and can drastically decrease incidents requiring technical support.
School districts typically lack sufficient time and resources to fulfill all teacher's and student's needs at once; when starting a device-loaner program, it signifies an entirely new educational environment - whether 1:1 program or ERT; having devices connected to the internet at students' homes change how teachers and students interact, leading them to need training for the use of these new devices at home and may necessitate ongoing professional Development for users who will require training as part of this journey.
Training and professional development tend to be interchanged terms; however, we use them differently when discussing how best to support staff, students and parents.
Training often covers hardware devices; how to navigate platforms (operating systems); working with learning management systems like Google Classroom, Schoology or Canvas (such as emails, video conferences chats), as well as software like word processing or movie making). Professional Development instead focuses on using those skills acquired during training in an effective and pedagogically sound way that supports instruction and learning.
Professional Development and training often go hand in hand; however, we will only delve so profoundly into establishing professional development practices.
Districts must understand the value and role of Professional Development for educators. IT departments often play an integral part, which device loaner programs support through device loaner programs that focus on both parties involved.
Though your IT staff might know more than most about technology, they still need to gain a firm grasp on using it for educational purposes.
Technology advances at an incredible rate; school districts should allocate sufficient time and resources for IT training as it moves quickly; it would be foolish to assume a typical user knows everything.
Want More Information About Our Services? Talk to Our Consultants!
Conclusion
From an end-user perspective, Professional Development and training are indistinguishable; users require assistance.
School districts should establish mechanisms to route help requests related to professional Development to appropriate channels; for instance, teachers could request help from technology integrators/coaches instead of tech support.
