Today’s IT service desks and IT organizations face countless challenges. These challenges can be effectively overcome with a comprehensive IT service management (ITSM) strategy, and the right supporting solutions in place.
What are some of the most common obstacles an IT service desk should help your company tackle?
1. Our IT support processes lack structure.
Most companies lack a standardized way of handling problems and issues. An end user opens a ticket. It gets assigned to someone. They fix it. But there’s no rhyme or reason to how it’s done. An IT service management solution can lend structure to an IT help desk and IT support processes, helping you define and enforce formal workflows to be followed whenever a new ticket is opened. Some of the mundane, repetitive tasks can even be streamlined and automated. For example, certain types of tickets can be dynamically routed to specific individuals based on skills and experience.
2. We don’t know what works, and what doesn’t.
Without a comprehensive ITSM strategy, companies seldom have insight into which procedures are effective, and which ones aren’t. An IT service desk tool can change all that, providing valuable intelligence into which activities result in the fastest resolutions, and which ones have the greatest positive impact on system performance and reliability. So, you can boost productivity by creating a set of best practices to be adhered to when common problems and issues arise.
3. We have a hard time measuring the efficiency of our staff.
IT service desk solutions allow companies to better assess the efficiency and effectiveness of their human resources. For example, many of the more advanced systems enable full, end-to-end tracking of the amount of time spent on each incident. This can help managers step in when issues take too long to resolve, and enable them to identify areas in need of improvement (i.e. if a staff member needs additional training on a certain topic).
4. Our support team wastes too much time on “routine” calls.
IT resources are scarce nowadays, and businesses need to ensure they are being utilized to their fullest potential. Answering routine inquiries – for example, responding to an end user checking on the status of a software purchase request – is not the most effective use of their time. Cloud-based services desk software provides end users with a variety of “self-service” features, such the ability to track the status of open issues online, or to access a knowledge base that will allow them to troubleshoot and correct simple, common problems on their own. This frees up support staff to focus on resolving more complex or urgent issues.
5. We have trouble tracking asset repair histories.
Companies with manual ITSM policies in place may be able to store data about incidents and how they were resolved, but often struggle to link those details to the actual systems involved. This leaves them with limited visibility into the histories of their assets, hindering them from making informed decisions about replacements, upgrades, etc. But, with an IT service desk solution that is unified with an IT asset management environment, companies can maintain complete histories of all problems and issues for each and every component of their technology infrastructure.
6. We have service “silos”.
Many organizations provide support through multiple channels – email, web, phone. And, they often find it difficult to manage these various venues in a consolidated fashion, and unify the information generated by related service activities. An IT service desk provides an effective way to cohesively organize issues across multiple channels, making it easier to control, measure, and document associated support procedures.