With the support of the listed IT help desk best practices you’ll be able to create a more resilient and faster network, and strengthen your IT environment overall. This in turn can help accelerate business growth and empower your workers to be more productive.
But before we get into IT help desk categories of best practices, we have to make an important distinction between a help desk and a service desk:
- What is a Helpdesk?: A helpdesk is a bundle of services that most often applies to application support and ticket support from an experienced help desk team. A strong help desk support team will be able to provide rapid response times irrespective of ticket volumes. Some (but not all) associate help desks with simpler IT issues, like break-fix issues with devices as well as service requests for Microsoft suite, Windows, and common components of your IT environment.
- What is a Service desk?: Some will define service desk as being more focused on strategic IT management and IT service management (think network support and on-site technicians for in-person issues). They can provide customer support for project management, network support, infrastructure support, and more.
It’s important to remember that not all managed service providers use the same terminology. Some will group the above two terms to mean more or less the same thing, while others will make the distinction clear.
In any case, an IT help desk is meant to help you and your business avoid expensive prolonged network downtime. And that’s a vital service for any business – downtime can cost $5,600 per minute, according to an oft-cited report by Garnter.
How Can an IT Help Desk Support My Business?
Now that we have a firmer understanding of the nuances in IT help desk terminology, let’s briefly rundown the chief responsibilities an IT help desk is meant to handle.
Improve Support Ticket Turnaround Time
As mentioned above, one of the most important areas that an IT help desk can support you in is in getting your business operations back up and running in the event of network downtime. The period of time you have to wait for your ticket to be processed and addressed through a service portal should typically be around 30 minutes or less when working with the top providers.
Empower Your Team to Be More Productive
Your team members should be able to rely on their network and general IT environment to support their work, not hinder it. IT help desk management means having access to proven IT technicians able to identify an IT disruption and resolve the common IT problem before it has time to cause severe damage to your business.
Learn more about what an managed services provider can do for your business:
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- How an Outsourced CIO Can Improve Vermont Businesses
- Benefits of IT Outsourcing
- How Much Do Managed IT Services Cost?
- What are the Different Tiers of IT Support
What Are the Top IT Help Desk Best Practices?
Let’s now highlight and examine a few examples of IT help desk best practices. When properly implemented, an IT help desk best practice can be among the most cost-effective investments you’ll make into your IT and one of the biggest potential drivers of IT ROI.
Support Portal
Your managed services provider (MSP) should be able to provide a support portal that is easy to use and ensures that your tickets will be processed quickly and efficiently. You should never have to repeat yourself when talking to technicians, and the support portal goes a long way towards ensuring you won’t waste needless time being passed around between IT technicians.
Automated Ticket Routing
Automated ticket routing is key to getting your issues to the right technician when they appear, saving on the time it takes to address the disruption.
Create Checklist Templates
Creating a series of templates for common issues will help expedite the remediation process. Furthermore, a checklist in your PSA tool or your CRM ensures that your techs don’t miss critical steps when resolving issues, increasing customer satisfaction. The checklists, in other words, will help prevent a job being half-done, as all the requisite criteria have to be met in order for the ticket to be closed.
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Expert IT Technicians
In order to ensure that your IT issues are resolved, you’ll have to be sure to work with proven experts boasting a deep knowledge base of IT. They should not only be well-versed in all things IT (not to mention have teams based in your city for swift response to in-person obstacles) but should also have a strong understanding of the ticket management software.
Agreed Upon Levels of Service
Whether through a service level agreement or some other mechanism, you should have some manner of certainty that the customer service will meet your expectations and your IT issues will be resolved. This needs to be established in the early parts of the MSP contract negotiation, but any proven MSP will be sure to clearly delineate service level expectations.
IT Help Desk Best Practices From Experts
If you’re looking for top-tier managed services and IT help desk support, you need to work with experts.
VTC TECH is an industry-leading MSP with top-tier help desk services, ensuring that all your IT issues get addressed and resolved before they can harm your business. Get in touch to give your business the support it needs.
