In today’s customer service-oriented world, smooth-running IT help desks are more necessity than choice. Yet many organizations blindly adopt help desk technologies without first identifying their business requirements and determining whether the sought-after solution meets those requirements. Because of this, many help desk implementations fail to deliver the expected results—with management of the ticketing process emerging as the primary pitfall.
1. Difficulty of Handling Growing Ticket Volume
When the sheer number of tickets increases substantially, most help desk solutions tend to fail to scale accordingly. Coupled with challenges like end-to-end activity tracking and workflow management, help desk tickets become exponentially more cumbersome.
Without appropriate support from your help desk software, it becomes extremely difficult to manage customer requests, help desk actions, and ticket resolutions. The growing volume of tickets you face can easily inhibit your ability to track:
Dependencies between tickets
Prioritization and assignment of tickets based on staff availability and ticket severity
Service activity on a ticket from creation to closure
Response time and effectiveness of ticket handling
Communication between the end-user and the technician
2. Complexity of Managing the Ticketing Process
Help desk software is certainly the preferred instrument for managing customer support, but many help desk technologies are not simple to work with, many users continue to email help desk staff directly. Help desk staff should spend less time managing the ticketing software and more time troubleshooting and resolving problems.
Customization and automation of the ticketing process can help them do exactly that, by offering:
Flexible, dynamic business rules for automated routing and ticket updates
Dynamic assignment of tickets to a specific tech or group of techs based on skill set, location, department, availability, work load, etc.
Automatic conversion of service request emails into trouble tickets (including file attachments)
Customizable ticket submission forms to make it easier for the end-user
3. Lack of Proper Reporting & Metrics
In addition to scalability and complexity issues, many IT help desk solutions also lack the necessary reporting capabilities that provide key indicators and metrics for measuring help desk performance.
Proper reporting gives you visibility into:
Fulfillment of help desk requests
Timeliness of service resolution
Performance of help desk technicians
End-user feedback to analyze bottlenecks and reasons for customer dissatisfaction
Your management team needs built-in comprehensive reporting to be able to quickly identify where end-users need additional assistance and easily determine the primary causes of recurring tickets. Help desk reporting is an essential tool for making improvements, particularly when the metrics analyzed offer a clear plan of action and input for quick decision-making.
Help Desk Software Doesn’t Have to be Complicated
Successful help desk implementation is about understanding how your end-users are using the IT help desk so you can simplify and expedite ticket resolution for them. Help desk implementation can be easy as long as you have done the research to choose the right solution for your organization and know how to customize it to meet your specific business requirements.
SolarWinds Web Help Desk offers affordable yet powerful IT help desk ticketing software with simplicity and automation to help you quickly resolve problems, escalate issues, and isolate root causes. With built-in reporting tools to customize, schedule, export, and email reports, Web Help Desk gives you complete control of your ticketing process. Try the fully-functional 30-day free trial today!
Easy-to-use Help Desk Software & Simplified Ticketing = Happy Help Desk Staff & Happy Customers 
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