Contact us anytime to know more — Abhishek P., Founder & CFO CISIN
What Is A Help Desk?
Help desk software allows IT users to resolve problems by accessing one or more single points of contact (or more).
IT helpdesks enable employees and members of IT teams to use them as an assistance system - troubleshoot issues and track them, receive guidance or receive help about products or processes; when something breaks, it's usually the first place people turn.
IT helpdesks of today offer much more than simply phone numbers with tech experts on call who will walk them through how to address any IT problems they are encountering.
Like other software processes, helpdesks have evolved into comprehensive platforms with various functions integrated within. Self-service sites may even help redirect employee questions about IT processes back towards IT helpdesks. At the same time, IT managers gain visibility into which questions and cases come up frequently so as to implement standard processes or find solutions more quickly.
Why Do You Require It Helpdesk Services?
IT help desks serve as the first point of call for customer interactions and employees with IT problems to receive assistance, rather than them having to figure out their means for receiving it on their own.
Creating easily accessible single points of contact for IT-related matters helps desks decrease frustration while saving both time and frustration when someone needs IT support. Running customer-oriented businesses requires IT help desks; providing this essential service will keep headaches at bay as well as lost productivity from occurring.
What Is The It Help Desk?
This software allows IT staff to create tickets for many events, including:
- Software bugs in companies
- New Features Requests
- General employee questions
- Network or VPN problems
- Problems with login credentials
- Compatibility issues with devices
- Maintenance updates scheduled
The software generates tickets for every issue raised by employees via phone calls, emails or texts. An intuitive user interface enables IT teams to collaborate efficiently on several tickets at once - useful because addressing an issue might require input from various departments.
IT helpdesk software that groups tickets that have similar problems helps developers track bugs easily and saves them time by consolidating them all together into one ticket when one bug has been addressed.
Once patched, all related tickets can be closed off together as quickly as possible to save you time when closing them one after the other.
IT service desks become even more valuable with searchable help centers. Quick answers can quickly address common inquiries while creating a space where senior staff can share expertise with new hires.
Such help desks reduce tickets while shortening onboarding times for employees.
What Distinguishes An It Helpdesk From An It Service Desk?
IT help desk and service desk may seem similar on paper; both terms are frequently used interchangeably by IT specialists who may disagree on which platform should handle which tasks.
Nothing wrong with placing them all under one umbrella; however, their functionality differentiates them, and it's up to each company implementing them to decide on its roles and responsibilities.
It Service Desk
IT service desks enable teams to proactively maintain services, manage incidents and communicate with customers and end users effectively.
An IT service desk serves as the hub of communication for users, employees and stakeholders looking for IT help from providers, offering top-quality assistance while solving issues as quickly as possible. The goal of an IT service desk should always be to provide superior service while quickly resolving issues that arise.
IT service desks and helpdesks share responsibility for incident management - commonly referred to as "break-fix." Additionally, service requests, self-service options and reporting are managed at IT helpdesks and service desks, respectively.
Help desk capabilities exist alongside avenues that enable employees to obtain new services; plus, self-service capabilities with knowledge management options provide answers when employees have questions.
It Help Desk
At the dawn of the IT revolution, help desks were initially intended to assist IT teams rather than end users; today however, customers also utilize helpdesk as part of their experience, further blurring the distinction between IT and end users.
IT help desks specialize in incident management. Reactive assistance rather than proactive assistance is provided through basic ticketing systems; any employee or customer may submit one in order to resolve their IT problem.
A help desk serves primarily to meet the IT team's needs so they may deliver better services within your organization.
Service desk and help desk tasks may overlap depending on the organization's structure, as their roles differ depending on each business.
Therefore, there's no need to outline their roles within any one company clearly.
From Where Did It Service Desks Originate?
Technically speaking, IT help desks fall within the larger definition of service desks.
Helpdesks were originally the precursors to service desks - the latter developed out of needing more holistic solutions for users.
IT service desks that prioritize employee and customer support tend to focus on user needs rather than maintaining outages - providing employees and customers with support when maintenance outages happen and alerting customers so that ticket volumes won't spike when planned maintenance goes offline, for instance.
How Do I Set Up A Help Desk?
Step 1: Plan Your Help Desk Workflow
Begin by reviewing customer service goals, challenges to overcome in supporting help desk operations and how each setup may vary based on industry goals and personal preference.
Depending on your team size and industry, workflows can be set up and customized specifically to your business. For instance, adding twenty agents to a help desk might present them all answering similar queries at once, or you might divide them up for industry-specific support requests.
Our experience shows us that small businesses increasingly request customized support portals as we set up helpdesks.
Begin with the following questions.
- How many support email addresses will you require? While consolidating customer emails to one mailbox linked with your help desk might suffice, do you also require multiple mailboxes as part of this strategy?
- Do you require different internal agents to manage different requests? As well, how many agents? And which agents require access and permission levels of which sorts?
- What communication channels would you like added to the ticketing system to enhance customer service and enhance the overall customer experience?
- Which metrics would you like to track for your help desk agents' performance and customer satisfaction scores?
- Do you want to collect customer feedback on every service interaction?
- What are the elements you require in your self-service platform? Would you like a contact form to go with your FAQs?
Step 2: Add Customer Service Channels
Now is the time to integrate all your support channels with your helpdesk, starting with email as the primary customer service channel for many businesses.
Setting up this email channel should be your initial step.
- After selecting an email address to support, enter it in your help desk to create the support ID and add email support ID verification codes or links directly into it. Your help desk should send verification links or verification codes directly back out.
- Once your account has been verified, you will be able to set rules to automatically forward any emails received in your support inbox directly to your help desk.
Step 3: Bring In Your Support Team
Now is the time to add agents to the help desk! Permission can be granted or withheld depending on which plan and licenses have been purchased by each.
- Adding Team Members: Start by creating agent profiles, which your agents can then modify with unique email addresses, contact details and time zones they will operate from. Map them now or later onto specific groups like billing or returns operations, for example - some help desks also allow for selecting whether you require full or part-time agents.
- Define roles and permissions for agents: You can also select what level of access they will have. For instance, you might wish to prevent certain team members from editing tickets while permitting them to view others, or perhaps certain agents should only view certain requests without editing any tickets themselves.
Select a specific role for team members, such as account administrator, supervisor or agent, so that you can restrict or allow certain activities they can undertake within your help desk.
A supervisor, for example, might be allowed to create reports, while an agent would likely not.
Step 4: Define Sla Policies
SLAs in customer service represent agreements between businesses and their customers regarding speed and scope expectations.
You can set targets or deadlines for your team to respond on the first channel or address customer issues quickly and satisfactorily. Prior to creating SLAs, however, ensure your help desk accurately reflects operational hours within your company.Set different SLAs if your help desk allows for multiple SLAs.
step 5: Create automated ticket workflows
Help desks are an effective way of automating manual processes while cutting costs through reduced manual labor.
- Automatic ticketing: Assigning specific forms of support based on agent skills or workload. Or assign specific support measures randomly.
- Rules for time-triggered automation: "If following up with clients is becoming difficult, setting time-triggered rules to send reminder emails at specified intervals may save both time and effort,"
- Automating escalation: Rules can also be set up that send email alerts to agents when deadlines or service level agreements (SLA) have been missed. Businesses sometimes view CSAT scores as an important metric of customer satisfaction and wish to implement policies when receiving low ratings - feedback will automatically generate a customer ticket. An agent contacts customers to see if there's anything they can improve or correct within their organization.
- Filtering customer queries based on keywords: Create keyword-based filters to differentiate inquiries according to keywords entered, assign them the relevant agent group, and determine who should handle each inquiry.
- Automatic email notifications for customers: Staying ahead of customer needs means always keeping them updated - with automatic email notifications providing them with updates as they occur.
Read More: Importance Of 24/7 IT Support – Why Business Need It
Step 6: Configure Agent Productivity Features
Agents can take advantage of time-saving features available within help desk systems in order to deliver faster and simpler support services to their agents.
Here are a few popular help desk productivity tricks you should implement with them.
- Predefined personalized response template: Create templates or canned responses with dynamic placeholders for customer responses that agents can quickly click-add instead of typing out identical answers several times. These templates help maintain consistency in customer communications.
- Create automation for common scenarios of support: Create a workflow to automate steps agents perform for customers' requests, such as returns. A knowledge base may also help agents quickly access FAQ documentation or product guides they require in their job duties.
Step 7: Configure Your Self-Service Portal
Customers find it much simpler and cost-efficient to resolve issues themselves without needing human agents as intermediaries.
To facilitate self-help, consider offering your customers a self-service portal on your help desk with frequently asked questions (FAQs) and guides.
Self-service portals on your website offer customers an effective means of reaching you quickly. By customizing forms to fit seamlessly with user experiences and making support portals easily accessible via social media channels -
Your helpdesk likely offers various features for creating frequently asked questions (FAQs), troubleshooting videos and video guides based on which questions and issues people typically seek assistance for.
By compiling such resources in one location, you can increase efficiency for customers seeking assistance quickly and effectively.
Step 8: Integrate Your Existing Apps Into Your Help Desk
Your help desk should integrate with other apps like Microsoft Teams, Slack or Shopify if your customer data is scattered among various tools.
With all this data at their fingertips, your team can resolve issues faster.
Step 9: Check the security settings on your help desk
Step two of setting up your help desk involves activating security features. Gives you various security options, including single sign-on for agents and selecting where your data resides; DKIM (Domain Key-Identified Mail) verification can help prevent email ID spoofing by verifying domain ownership, thus protecting you against identity thieves using fake support email accounts to impersonate businesses with similar support emails as your own.
Step 10: Test And Optimize Your Help Desk Deployment
Now, it is time to create your first ticket and verify if all channels and workflows are operating as they should.
Use the built-in reports of your help desk to gain insight into its usage. For instance, keeping an eye on ticket volumes received, analyzing ticket patterns, and monitoring SLA metrics like first response time and average resolution time are just some benefits of help desk reporting!
Benefits Of Having An It Help Desk For Your Small Business
Most companies start off their IT journey by establishing a help desk, which offers numerous advantages over time.
1. Enhances Organizational Efficiency
Failure of technology that's crucial for your organization can have serious repercussions for its operations: compromised customer service, staff morale and productivity decline rapidly, and clients become even more disgruntled.
Help desks can assist your company by quickly responding to incidents related to it.
Your employees' access to IT will ensure the efficiency of your organization. Your help desk is there to answer everyday organizational queries such as creating system accounts or resetting passwords - or answer technical inquiries from both customers and employees.
2. Resolves Problems
As part of ITIL incident management, the help desk is an indispensable component in handling technical issues and incidents that arise in relation to them.
While incidents often appear independent from one another, if multiple incidents appear related, this may indicate deeper underlying problems that require attention. ITIL considers systemic incidents to be problems and has developed specific management practices for handling them.
These problems often go unaddressed, leading to further frustration and diminishing user trust. As a single point of contact for all technical inquiries, help desks are ideal for the early detection of potential problems.
3. Enhances User Experience
Help desk services offer users an improved IT experience, as the team there possesses technical know-how and can quickly address hardware and software issues.
Help desks serve as the main contact point for IT issues, giving users access to support they require for IT-related requests and informing them as their requests are worked upon and once resolved. They should remain accessible during that process to facilitate user satisfaction.
Best Practices For Implementing And Using An It Help Desk
It is easy to set up a help desk for your business. To maximize the success of your help desk, keep these best practices in view.
Practice 1: Identify Your Needs
Determine the goals and needs of your IT help desk.
- Does your help desk only work with internal teams or customers?
- How much coverage do you require? Do you need IT support during business hours or 24 hours per day?
- Define your help desk's scope of work. Will they only service a portion of your company? Focus on high-value customers? They should only deal with the technical requests and issues that are received, or do they have to take on broader responsibilities like analyzing trends and automating workflows as well?
- How will customers or users within your company contact the help desk? Email, phone, text, chat or a ticketing system will you be using?
Considering these factors, you can model your projected workload to help determine how many technicians are needed for a help desk.
If the team does not have broad responsibilities, then 70% of its time should be devoted to answering requests and solving issues, while 30% can be allocated towards training/meetings - however, this percentage can be adjusted according to how large your team is. Your budget and needs may dictate whether to outsource or hire your help desk service provider.
Practice 2: Provide Tools And Processes
Align your processes with help desk requirements and select IT management software that supports these processes.
If your help desk agents are limited in number, design a workflow that encourages users first to visit a self-service portal and search your online knowledge database before approaching support - this way, your help desk team won't waste their time answering repetitive inquiries from users. Provide guidelines for the help desk that prioritize tasks; not all requests from users require equal importance or urgency.
Be specific in defining high-priority issues, so the help desk team knows when a request should move to the top of its queue or escalate further to managers or other departments.
Implement a service-request process where users submit "tickets" outlining their IT needs directly to the help desk in order to track the progress of requests more closely, enhance central communication channels and prevent requests from going unattended or getting forgotten altogether.
Practice 3: Implement Automation
Your help desk will become busier as your business expands; automating will enable you to reduce costs while continuing to provide quality IT services.
Automated workflows provide help desk staff with an effective method to streamline many of the routine tasks that must be accomplished on a daily basis.
Below are a few common examples.
- You can set up your IT system to automatically reset forgotten passwords.
- Create rules to direct tickets to the correct team members in your IT ticketing software.
- Create an automated reply to confirm receipt of tickets submitted and provide users with the ticket number as a reference.
Practice 4: Define Slas
Service level agreements (SLAs) are of utmost importance in any help desk implementation effort, serving as commitments from your help desk to respond within certain time frames when IT-related inquiries arrive at their helpdesk.
Customers and other users care most about how quickly IT requests can be fulfilled, so be sure to communicate the SLA or, for unforeseeable issues like technical challenges, set expectations with them by sharing updates as frequently as possible.
Your service level agreements for your help desk depend on its staffing needs, their working hours, and how many daily requests come their way.
Practice 5: Track Metrics
Implementation of your company's help desk should only be the starting point - over time, as your business expands and you learn which tools and processes work best, the help desk operation will expand accordingly.
IT Service Management stresses identifying improvement opportunities as a vital aspect of their service offering - you cannot improve without measuring!
Set benchmarks and metrics for your helpdesk helpdesk before establishing how you will meet or surpass them. Compare Service Level Agreements against average response times and times required to close tickets.
Track tickets and categorize them based on their nature; for instance, tracking how often the help desk was requested to reset passwords can provide insight into which areas should be automated as well as which support staff are necessary for support staff members to keep moving smoothly.
How To Become A Help Desk Technician In 3 Easy Steps
Discover what skills and qualifications are necessary for becoming a help desk technologist.
Help desk technicians are customer service representatives who specialize in using their hardware and software knowledge to troubleshoot problems for customers.
In order to be effective at this job, help desk technicians must possess excellent interpersonal communication skills so that they may interact successfully with all types of individuals.
Help desk technician jobs could be ideal if you enjoy engaging with people and are passionate about service delivery.
Here's more information on this role, how it operates, and how you can become one!
What Is A Help Desk Technician?
Help desk technicians are IT professionals who assist customers with the proper use of technology. This includes:
- Customer Support: How to respond
- Customers can be helped to troubleshoot issues remotely or in person.
- Offer technical support to users in the configuration, setup and maintenance of products.
- Directing unresolved problems to the appropriate teams
- Documenting problems and processes
- Security awareness training for end users
In the United States, 48 percent of all help desk specialists hold a bachelor's and 35 percent an associate degree.
A Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science is an example of a relevant bachelor's degree that aspiring help desk technicians can pursue.
Essential Skills for Help Desk Technicians
In addition to technical skills, a help desk technician should also have workplace skills. Checklist of important skills in each category
- Understanding of operating systems and software devices
- Problem-solving Skills
- Analytical Skills
- Customer service experience
- Patience
- Communication skills in written and verbal form
3 Steps to becoming a Help Desk Technician
Don't fret if you lack all of the skills listed above - our guide can help you acquire those necessary for becoming a Help Desk Technician.
1. Build your skill set.
Your qualifications might already qualify you to pursue a career as a help desk technologist; for example, customer service experience could serve as the cornerstone.
But to become one, additional technical training will likely be needed.
Anyone with an extensive technical background but insufficient customer service experience should focus on honing their communication skills.
By taking part in Google's Fundamentals of Technical Support program, they can improve both of these areas simultaneously.
2. Strengthen Your Resume
Your resume provides you with a platform for you to showcase your knowledge. Completion of a Professional Certificate or any form of education could prove worthwhile; IBM provides one such certificate which helps IT users acquire essential IT soft skills and knowledge.
those who successfully complete it will even earn themselves an IBM badge as well as accessing special resources to aid job placement!
3. Stay up to date.
Tech professionals must keep abreast of the newest technologies and trends to remain marketable in their profession.
One way of staying up-to-date can be accomplished through keeping an eye on industry leaders via social media or YouTube; you could then discover which skills are in demand by watching these leaders' activity on these channels, joining relevant forums or communities, networking with professionals within your field of interest - this way everyone stays current!
Conclusion
Cyber Infrastruture Inc. provides an effective IT help desk solution, simplifying how IT teams collaborate to offer services while adhering to best practice from ITIL.
Customize ITIL implementation to fit perfectly, allows you to do just that with our user-friendly ITIL tool complexity-free implementation solution - giving you time and focus for what matters with our flexibility and analytics that foster continuous improvement, the core principle behind ITIL.
