Organizations of every size find themselves looking for the right help desk solution to meet their IT and end-user requirements. Some have not implemented any solution yet, and there are those not satisfied with their current solution and are in search of a better one.
Whichever of these categories you belong to, you will certainly find it demanding to make a choice given the plethora of help desk tools and software storming the market. So, where do you start and how do you go about it? Let us give you some tips and wise counsel (maybe more geeky than wise) to make your life easier with help desk and ticketing management.
#1 Simplify & Automate as Much as Possible
At the end of the day, it’s all about resolution of help desk tickets for an IT technician. The more you simplify the ticketing and management process, the more time you gain for troubleshooting and problem resolution. Look for a solution that makes ticket creation, assignment, escalation and management simple, and doesn’t require much manual effort. Both the technicians and the end-users should feel comfortable using the help desk. You need more options for creating tickets – quick tickets for common IT tasks, special assignment, and priority based on specific request conditions, running multi-stage tasks, etc.
#2 Look for Software with an Easy-to-Use Web Interface
For overall familiarity and less ramp-up time, Web-based help desk software is the best bet. The centralized Web interface gives the help desk support staff get more control, and it makes the team’s jobs easier by being able to log into just a single console to execute administrative tasks. A Web interface also makes a better end-user experience. With customizable ticket forms and dynamic ticket creation templates, it becomes easier to create a ticket, define priority and SLAs, and communicate with the assigned technician—all from a single interface.
#3 Accommodate Old-School Email Service Requests
Though it’s best to have an easy, consolidated Web interface for ticket creation, your help desk software should still be able to receive users’ IT requests via email and convert them into a service desk ticket dynamically. So, look for a Web-based solution that also converts in-bound emails into help desk tickets and allows you to send outbound emails to end-users and other support staff for status tracking and communication.
#4 Save Your End-Users From Themselves
A built-in knowledge base (KB) is incredibly useful for providing self-service options to the user who’s logging a ticket. Your help desk software should provide FAQs and tech tips at the time of ticket creation to help them with self-resolution on simple and common issues. KB content is also invaluable for help desk analysts when referring to frequently faced problems and who need detailed but quick resolution tips on-the-fly.
#5 Reporting is Your Friend
What you don’t know could hurt you—and your team. If you are in charge of your organization’s IT help desk, you need to be able to know how many tickets your technicians are handling, how quickly they are being resolved, how satisfied your end-customers are, what common issues need more attention, which problems often recur or cause additional issues, etc.
By measuring the performance of the help desk staff with robust reports and comprehensive ticket resolution statistics, you’ll be able to identify strengths and weaknesses, recognize patterns in help desk service issues, carve out plans for process improvements, improve your help desk’s service quality, and better manage your help desk team overall. In other words, metrics matter - a lot!
Here’s a quick checklist to help you make your decision on the right help desk software. Look for:
Easy-to-use help desk software with ticketing automation to reduce manual efforts and simplify ticketing management
Simple and intuitive Web help desk interface for both technicians and end-users
Automatic conversion of email service requests to help desk tickets
Built-in Knowledge Base to provide self-resolution options to your users
Robust performance reporting to monitor technician performance and overall help desk management
And remember to try before you buy. Evaluation will prove worthy for making the right choice. Stay tuned for more tips. We just cannot stop at 5 especially when we are geeks and we like sharing help desk love.
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