How to run Help desk

How do you build a service center that can meet the needs of a scalable organization? At Atlassian, we have faced this question ourselves. In 2010, we had 230 employees. That number has exploded: there are many thousands of us these days. With rapid growth, we seek every opportunity to become more efficient, and managing an efficient service center is a big part of it.

What is the service table?

First: let's be clear about what service offices do. The ITIL 4 glossary defines a service center as "the single point of contact between the service provider and users". A typical service center handles service requests and incidents.

The service center is the center where customers (for example, employees or other interested parties) can find help from their IT service providers. Regardless of the type of assistance provided, the goal of a service, the desk is to provide high-quality service to customers in a timely manner.

HELP TABLE VS SERVICE TABLE

There are often questions about the differences between helpdesk and support services. To some extent, these can be semantic differences. With that said, the help desk is generally considered more tactical and designed to quickly resolve immediate problems. Serviced offices are considered more strategic and are designed to meet broader business needs. They often support multiple ITSM practices.

how to run a help desk

Service Desk Best Practices

Your service center is the first line of support, a representation of your IT team and essential for team activation. It is at the heart of productive organizations. Adopting Service Desk best practices can help manage costs and deliver great service experiences. Between installing new offices, integrating new employees, and expanding at high speed, we learned a few things that helped along the way. Here are our tips:

1. Use your service center software to its fullest potential

A long time ago at Atlassian, we didn't use a specially designed service center, so with the creation of this global support team, we decided to move from tracking issues in Jira Software to using Jira Service Desktop for self-service, SLA monitoring, and collaboration.

We had to adapt to manage a high volume of tickets while contributing and maintaining our support knowledge base. We've also embraced knowledge-centric support as a way to reduce ticket volume and improve resolution times.

2. Stop treating your IT teams as "generals"

Ticket variety can often be more challenging than the volume of incoming tickets. Like many of our clients, our infrastructure is quite complex. It's safe to say that we have miles of cables and tons of metal and thousands of virtual machines running our local offices, data centers, and application services. Before launching a dedicated Level 1 support team, our IT specialists rushed between user account management, desktop and hardware support, office and network infrastructure, application and system change requests, project work, and maintenance.

Our first big lesson was to stop spreading so much variety and volume within the same team. Instead, we divide ourselves into three more specialized teams:

• Office engineering, to manage the local network and the unique technological needs in each location.

• Workplace technology, covering our workplace productivity tools such as Jira, our travel booking system, etc.

• Atlasdesk, our global service team

Life has become much simpler as teams receive much more specific work. Additionally, areas of specialization allow team members to become true experts in a particular area and ultimately resolve incidents and problems more quickly as our knowledge becomes more deeply ingrained and our attention more focused.

3. Create a customer portal

It shouldn't be difficult for clients to ask for help. We use Jira Service Desk to provide a single customer service center that connects the IT service center and many of our departmental service offices, such as legal and human resources, so that customers can go to the same place to find all services what do you need.

It is also very easy to access the portal. Employees simply type go / it helps in their browser and are instantly redirected to the right place. New employees learn this as part of the integration, so they know how to get help quickly and easily from day one.

4. Be smart with ALS

Like any good customer service team, we want our customers to get the best possible service. To measure our progress, we always set goals, but they were not always easy to follow or customize for different geographies, teams, priority levels, etc.

When we launch our global service center team, we start from day one with clear SLAs that are easy for service center analysts to understand and follow. Furthermore, they are extremely customizable, so managers can define meaningful and relevant SLAs for their teams, not just arbitrary measures.

5. Promote self-service for customers.

Studies show that 72% of customers prefer to use self-service support. For this to be true, however, it must be easy to use. The self-service portal mentioned above is one way to make it easier for customers to find what they are looking for. Knowledge bases and question-and-answer communities are also helpful.

6. Look at the big picture and measure your progress

We definitely monitor key operational metrics like most IT organizations. But we are no longer obsessed with random KPIs and are now much more focused on measuring what matters most. In summary, we prioritize customer experience and spend our time exploring trends and numbers that can help us make the biggest improvements.

We spend our time looking at the peaks and valleys in the data, then ask ourselves "why" get to the bottom of the causes of "good" experiences versus "bad" experiences for customers, and low volume volumes by comparison with high volume days for our team. We focus on preventing incidents, not just solving problems. This is important to the efficiency and happiness of our support analysts. It was also helpful to inform management, who appreciated this vision of the company.

As you can imagine, our teams are experiencing increasing difficulties as we adapt to new challenges. Yours too. The important thing is that you have the right tools to measure your effectiveness and make the best decisions to guide your team.