Tips from IT Helpdesk Manager

 In this article we are going to learn about How to run a help desk from IT Helpdesk Manager

Good management of your IT helpdesk involves creating a high level of cohesion between your internal processes and the expectations of your external customers. Keeping everyone happy and managing their helpdesk well is a difficult task. To do this, you need the right tools, as well as well-documented and communicated processes, that give your staff and customers the right levels of expectations.

We asked several successful IT help desk managers for their best tips on how to manage their support activity wisely: keeping customers satisfied and their technicians accountable.

What the IT Manager Said:

You should have a clear understanding of all the metrics on your IT help desk, such as response time, first call resolution, and recovery time after service interruptions, and how to improve them to help with the bottom line. .

These expectations come largely from the past experiences of your company's IT support service and the requirements of your users. In other words, a user can expect it to take X hours to resolve a support ticket. Customer service conflicts or problems usually arise when a user has a problem that cannot be resolved within the specified time.

If you want to run your IT helpdesk more efficiently, you need to ensure that you strike a balance between providing the best customer service and the fastest response time for your customers, within your internal operational constraints, such as budgets and internal efficiency.

What can you do to find a balance between satisfied customers and efficient IT support service? Let's take a look at the top seven help desk admin tips provided by the IT support administrators themselves.

Document Your Service Level Agreement (SLA)

A service level agreement (SLA) allows you to predefine your IT technical support services internally and externally. This plain language agreement between you and your client will allow you to measure the success of your services based on the expectations you have already defined.

Once you have created your SLA, you should use it to track your performance against your overall business goals.

But tracking your SLA is difficult. First, you're forced to manage a large amount of raw data, and service level agreements need to be seamlessly integrated into your IT departments, so frequent modification can be difficult unless it is.

Unless you take advantage of a PSA system like SherpaDesk Computer Assist Software. With Sherpadesk's SLA tool, you can accurately report metrics, such as how long it took a customer to respond to you or how long it would take to resolve a particular problem. This tool helps keep the IT support team on the right track by monitoring whether their response and correction times meet agreed parameters.

When you start using SLAs to track the metrics that help you run your IT helpdesk, you need to be sure to look beyond the arbitrary metrics and measure the things that will help you achieve your goals. of your business

Document Your Process

New IT help desk managers and technicians may face new problems day after day. To combat this, it is recommended that its integration be fast. This will allow them to help their clients as quickly as possible. One way to do this would be to ask experienced technicians and IT help desk managers to document their processes.

Documenting your processes and explaining how to solve specific problems will speed up your production line and ensure customer problems are resolved faster.

These resolution documents should also be available to anyone who needs to access them. In this way, future help desk managers and technicians who encounter a problem for the first time can use the original solution to solve the problem, instead of wasting unnecessary time finding a solution on their own. the same

When you Can’t Manage the Time, Manage Self-Service Solutions

You might even think of going beyond simply documenting solutions for your IT support staff and considering documenting them for your customers through a knowledge bank.

It may not be possible to offer technical assistance 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, due to personnel or budget problems. However, that shouldn't stop you as a business owner or IT support manager from being able to provide excellent support when your team is offline.

Consider using the self-service tool included with an IT support solution like SherpaDesk, which has proven to be very effective in cases where your IT support team is busy or out of the office. Having a knowledge base solution that guides users on how to solve their problems enables them to take ownership of their own IT problems and solve them themselves.

So how can this self-service tool help you improve your IT help desk management skills? This can certainly reduce costs. Self-service support costs $ 0.10 or less per contact, while average live service costs (email, phone, or live chat) can cost more than $ 13, meaning your staff can spend more time solving more complex problems or pay more attention to VIP clients.

User End-to-End Transparency

For any problem, complex or not, the user and IT support technicians must be able to easily identify the status of the problem.

This will allow IT help desk technicians to solve outstanding problems by being able to jump where previous technologies have stayed. This saves time and reduces frustration for your end users.

Examine your outings

We mentioned earlier that in order for your IT helpdesk to be managed effectively, you must examine all of your operating results. This includes, above all, costs.

Determine how much it costs you to provide an efficient IT support service, in particular the costs of solving each call or ticket.

When you have a good indication of this cost, you can see what problems can be solved quickly and cheaply. For example, if the majority of IT tickets going through your help desk come from customers who need a simple and purposeful task, you might consider using self-service support documentation, such as SherpaDesk, so that your customers can help themselves. .

See also how your IT support team is divided. Do most of your team work on easier, low-maintenance tasks, leaving only a few senior IT support technicians to handle the most difficult tasks? Focusing on more difficult topics, while generating easier tickets for self-service tools, will do wonders for their efficiency, not to mention their results.

Choose Your Provider Wisely

As the saying goes, it's not the technology you use, but the way you use it. With that said, you need to make sure you offer comprehensive support as an IT support provider.

Ultimately, the IT support software you use is there to help you improve your business and keep your customers satisfied. So be sure to choose an IT support software solution that is well suited to what you hope to achieve as a business and that also includes all the features and integrations you need.

Final Takeaways

If you want to improve the way you manage your IT helpdesk, choosing the right PSA IT helpdesk software is essential. Let's say that when implementing a new helpdesk solution, "get a little closer and often" is best. The worst thing you can do is step in and try to change all your processes at the same time. Doing it in smaller, more manageable steps means you will spend less time focusing on mistakes and more time focusing on your overall business goal: to provide the best service to your customers in an efficient and cost-effective manner as possible.

It should also be noted that if you want effective IT help desk management, you must assess how well customers think their problems have been resolved.

This means that the first person to contact a customer must also be the follow-up contact, even if the solution was provided by another staff member.

Managing your IT help desk doesn't have to be a difficult task, and you don't have to break the bank. Choosing the right IT Helpdesk software and creating all your core processes from scratch will enable your team to become experts in the systems and processes necessary to get your job done right. This will help them feel empowered and ready for the success of world-class IT support. This means satisfied customers, and more customers means a happy end result for your business.