6 Problems Your IT Service Desk Should Solve

IT Service Desk, formerly known as ‘Ticket Management System’, is an integral part of an organization forming single point of contact to meet communication needs of both the staff and the users. The rise in technological complexities and the need for greater diligence to keep those technologies always available, has increased the demand and changed the scope of support. Be it the virtualization, SOA, BYOD, or IT green revolution, IT service desk has a significant impact on the performance in all cases.

Here is the list of 6 problems an IT Service Desk should solve to make your business agile:

# 1 – Recognizing a Service Request and Assigning Tickets

One of the biggest bandwidth guzzler for Service Desk is categorizing and sub-categorizing the incoming tickets and then routing it to the appropriate technician. The Service Desk system should be able to automatically categorize based on the Service, Category, Subcategory which makes it easier to route them towards the appropriate technician or workgroup which manages them. Tickets can then be automatically assigned to IT Support Staff based on attributes such as workload, specialization, location etc. A priority can be manually assigned or automatically based on a matrix using urgency and impact.

# 2 – Lack of Intelligence to Resolve Faster

Even today, many help desk solutions do not have proper insight about which procedures are effective and which are not. A comprehensive analytics-driven ITSM strategy for an IT Service Desk is the only solution. It provides you with valuable intelligence about the users, their patterns and recommends fastest resolution with greatest positive impact on user performance and experience.

# 3 – Mundane and Repetitive Tasks

Running IT Helpdesk is a bit like a dog chasing its tail. You need to go round and round every day managing the same task over for your employees. Lack of a streamlined process to handle these issues can cost the organization a lot. Your IT Service Desk should be able to streamline and automate all these mundane and repetitive tasks. Managing an IT process-oriented ITIL-based ITSM solution is the only way to handle such issues.

# 4 – Resolve Productivity Issues of the Support Staff

Is it hard for you to resolve productivity issues in your organization? Are you able to identify the problem areas? An advanced system capable of end-to-end tracking of incidents and the resource time spent on it will immensely help an organization to enhance the productivity of your Support Staff. The IT Service Desk system creates a trend map and recommend self-help modules to users without any involvement of the Help Desk staff. The system also allows you to define service levels in accordance with business needs to improve customer experience and the technician productivity.

# 5 – Increase in ticket volume and complexity

Employees, thanks to Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD), are using non-standard devices across the organization. This is significantly increasing volume and complexity of tickets being raised every hour. A standard IT Service Desk will not be able to handle this flood of requests. An ITIL based Service Desk automates the process of ticket creation for repetitive tasks, and brings consistency across the input fields to resolve this issue. It will even streamline the ticket management system and allows for organizing and prioritizing the tickets.

# 6 – Incident Control and Management

Interruptions to services and assets need to be addressed quickly to minimize the impact to business operations. The ITIL Service Desk should allow users to log incidents through multiple channels including a self-service portal, web interface, telephone, e-mails and SMS. Not just that, incidents should also be raised automatically on alarms or events from monitoring.

Wrapping up

A good IT Service Desk enables you to implement ITIL best practices for incident, problem, change and service fulfillment processes to make the service delivery standardized and agile. The help desk brings a 100% visibility and improves performance of your service delivery through SLA measurements, compliance and escalations. The inbuilt analytics and insights drawn from custom dashboards and reports helps CxO’s make well informed decisions.

Want to add more to the list? Please go ahead and send me your comments and I will take it up in the next part.