7 IT Helpdesk Best Practices

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A significant challenge for many expanding enterprises is that their everyday IT difficulties grow in parallel with additional recruitment, office expansions, and other growth initiatives. Whether it’s an unexpected internet outage, application glitches, or laptop malfunctions, your company will require a reliable resource to receive grievances and address them. That dependable resource is your IT support desk, which plays a critical role in ensuring each employee remains operational by resolving their daily IT concerns. In this post, we explore the components necessary for your IT help desk to cater to your business’s IT support requirements effectively.

What is an IT Helpdesk?

At their most fundamental level, help desks serve as places where employees can seek and receive assistance for IT-related issues, especially those related to products, services, and various in-house tools, platforms, and devices. In certain organizations, a help desk might be as straightforward as a single knowledgeable staff member well-versed in relevant technologies and equipped to resolve commonly-encountered problems. In larger, well-established enterprises, help desks may comprise teams of specialists supported by dedicated software tools intended to aid in the tracking and analysis of IT problems as they emerge.

What are the Primary Functions of IT Helpdesk?

The fundamental function of an IT helpdesk is, at its core, anchored in a contact number. It facilitates access for employees or customers seeking remote helpdesk support 24/7. This provides the advantage of addressing customer issues in real-time. Moreover, well-established support teams ensure effective scalability. The IT helpdesk support undertakes the following responsibilities:

The IT helpdesk promptly addresses incoming requests, whether they originate from authorized users via phone, email, or messaging applications.
The customer service division utilizes specialized IT helpdesk software to oversee incoming tickets. Such a ticketing system for the IT helpdesk guarantees the timely resolution of all customer inquiries. Consequently, both the initiation and management of these tickets fall under the purview of IT helpdesk personnel.
Given that customer support typically comprises multiple experts, a mechanism for escalation exists. This entails the transfer of tickets that individual team members cannot resolve to the next tier. This expedites responses to queries and enhances the reliability of problem resolution.

7 IT Helpdesk Best Practices

IT Helpdesk Best practices encompass the established protocols and methodologies that organizations can adopt to guarantee the streamlined and proficient functioning of their help desk activities. These procedures are designed to assure swift and persuasive resolution of customer problems, leading to elevated levels of customer contentment and heightened customer allegiance.

Below are a few of the crucial IT Helpdesk best practices that businesses should contemplate integrating:

Utilize the Appropriate Help Desk Software System

Your IT help desk should employ ITSM (IT Service Management) software like BMC Helix, ServiceNow, and others to facilitate its operations. ITSM empowers your help desk to receive service or incident tickets, manage assets, and report on ticket resolution rates and various metrics. A well-configured ITSM suite empowers IT help desks to handle substantial ticket volumes and diminish call volumes through features like self-service portals while managing IT support expenses. The challenge lies in having adequate resources to adequately set up your ITSM suite and sustain the associated costs of a functioning service desk, including payroll and equipment.

Recruit the Appropriate Talent

When emoploying IT Help Desk Best Practices, it’s essential to find individuals with the right skills and certifications. One way to ensure this is by getting them HDI (Help Desk Institute) certified. This certification not only demonstrates their proficiency in helpdesk best practices, including customer service and asset management but is also highly valued by leading managed IT service providers in Chicago, like Advance IT, who are known for their expertise in delivering top-notch IT support solutions.

Establish and Implement a Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Your IT support center should function in accordance with a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Within this SLA framework, you can mandate that your help desk team resolves a minimum percentage of tickets, promptly responds to calls and support requests within specified timeframes, and adheres to other stipulations. SLAs serve as a mechanism to ensure accountability within your desk team, thereby ensuring the effectiveness of your help desk processes.

Sustain Adequate Capacity

It is imperative to ensure that your service desk maintains sufficient capacity to meet your requirements. This entails not only having an ample workforce to handle your call and ticket volumes but also possessing the capability to attend to users and customers in various time zones or during non-standard hours and holiday periods.

Employ Automated Ticketing Systems

An adept ITSM suite will encompass automated ticketing functionalities. Nevertheless, the concept here extends beyond mere automation; you should explore the automation of as many manual, low-value tasks as feasible, liberating your agents to effectively address IT issues.

Deploy Specialized Help Desk Teams

In certain instances, there may arise the need for a specialized help desk team to concentrate or center their efforts on a specific set of applications or IT concerns. For instance, a majority of your team members may heavily rely on a particular application for their daily tasks, or you might have a critical IT system for which you aim to prioritize support. The objective is to ensure that the appropriate personnel promptly address tickets, thus eliminating delays caused by unnecessary escalations.

Utilize Pre-Formulated Responses

Revisiting the automation aspect we previously discussed, the primary aim of employing pre-formulated responses is to reduce the workload for your help desk staff. When assistance is requested, your ITSM suite should generate an automated response whenever feasible. You can take it a step further by combining canned responses with self-help resources, such as directing the user to a self-help portal or FAQ section, allowing them to attempt to resolve the issue autonomously.

Ready to Enhance Your Help Desk for Exceptional Support?

Merely being aware of the helpdesk best practices is insufficient. You must allocate sufficient time for your team to fully grasp and put into practice the most effective help desk procedures.

These constituted the foremost seven IT helpdesk best practices and principles that every business should incorporate. You have the option to implement some or all of these within your organization to optimize the management of your help desk. If you are in search of the finest help desk services capable of elevating your support operations from ordinary to outstanding, consider consulting with Advanced IT now.

FAQs

What Makes a Good IT Helpdesk

A good IT help desk is characterized by:

Proven automation and innovation capabilities
Strong cultural alignment and openness to adapt to evolving business requirements
Exceptional talent management strategies with robust recruitment criteria and emphasis on retaining talent

What is the ITIL help desk?

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) comprises a set of optimal methods intended to assist enterprises in delivering IT services to their clientele. ITIL is a broadly adopted framework originally developed by the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), an agency of the British government, and is presently under the ownership of AXELOS Ltd

What is the Best Approach to IT Helpdesk?

Knowledge sharing, pair coding, and cooperative problem-solving are superb service desk best practices to integrate into your team's ethos.