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A help desk offers several benefits to both small and medium businesses. Right from cost saving to scalability to technology enhancements, an IT help desk can give your business an edge over your competitors. You will recognize the relevance of a help desk in the business world when you resolve a nagging technical issue within a few minutes. With the help desk online, you do not need an IT technician to fix every small issue or scamper around looking for help. These features make the IT department of a company more efficient, resolve employee issues quickly and implement organization-wide infrastructural improvement.
What is a Help Desk?
An IT help desk is a combination of human resources and software that works in tandem to resolve end-user's issues as effectively and quickly as possible. It acts as a front-end of the IT department, serving as an access point for any employee who requires help.
Some companies outsource the help desk services, while some of them have an in-house support desk. Either way, an IT help desk can enable enterprise-wide improvements significantly.
Benefits of Help Desk for your Organization
1. Saves Costs
A help desk involves software, hardware, and human resources to support its processes. While a help desk implementation can be an investment, on one hand, it can result in significant cost savings over time in the following ways:
● It can quickly get employees back to work after issue resolution.
● The tech-savvy, professional people of the IT help desk can quickly resolve issues, the first time.
● Low-level issues can be transferred from senior staff, leaving them to manage other challenging problems.
● A robust help desk with a self-help portal enables organizations to resolve issues with minimum expenditure.
2. Helps in Support and Disaster Recovery
The IT department has a huge role to play in disaster recovery. It may need to recover lost data or set up remote connectivity for impacted employees. The service desk team must face the IT questions from the people affected by the disaster and report the disaster to the appropriate personnel. In these situations, help desk software will come in handy as it can streamline communication with the right personnel.
A disaster in the IT infrastructure may result in cybersecurity breaches, spiraling other issues. The help desk can track and document these issues to find solutions quickly making the organization more resilient.
3. Increases Work efficiency
An easy-to-use help desk platform can aid employees to effortlessly submit help tickets. The automated workflows provided by the help desk can escalate issue resolution, allowing employees to continue with their regular tasks. A streamlined and fast IT process improves employee productivity.
With a help desk system in place, the IT department needs to rely only on a few manual processes to help users. They do not need to document issues manually, prioritize requests, or assign tickets to the technical team. With these responsibilities out of the way, the IT department can focus on customer satisfaction and technology enhancement.
4. Prioritizes the IT tasks
The help desk is a very effective way to prioritize requests and ensure that end-users get quick and effective service. Also, issues can be categorized based on their importance. Issues that concern many people such as a failed router or server must take precedence over an individual issue. The IT help desk can help sort out and prioritize tasks as low, medium, high priority and this ensures that bigger/long-awaiting issues are resolved first.
5. Tracks Trends
The IT help desk can help departments track several trends. This helps the staff to identify the most reported issues and catch any spike in requests. Access to critical data allows the IT department to work on new problems as soon as they arise. You can also track internal trends through help desk software such as tickets closed per week, time is taken to resolve requests, and so on.
6. Data-driven Enhancements
The help desk stores business-critical data that can be used to improve software, services, and technology. It achieves this by analyzing recurring problems, performing in-depth analysis of problems, and data visualization of hardware, applications, and problem categories
7. End-User Service
The IT help desk is run like a business itself, with employees being its customers. With people used to quick service in this digital age, the help desk of an organization must also keep up. The IT help desk works like a customer service platform with technicians providing the best results possible, within the shortest possible time. The IT help desk serves its end-users effectively through improved communication, maintenance of customer knowledge base, and conducting post-service surveys for valuable insights.
8. Scalability
An IT department that is inundated with day-to-today manual processes cannot grow. A service desk extends the department’s abilities by automating critical tasks, logging issues, and assigning the right technicians to the issues. By maintaining detailed logs of issues and solutions, the help desk builds a knowledge base that can solve problems quicker. Users can leverage the data to create robust self-service portals and How-to guides. Users can solve their issues independently without asking for help.
All these help desk functions allow the IT employees to handle critical support tickets and stay productive even as the organization scales.
9. Quality Improvement
A company’s help desk is crucial for the improvement of the quality of its IT functions. Key metrics analyzed for IT service quality improvement is reduction in response and issue resolution times.
When a new request comes in, a help desk can automatically route it to the first available agent or the agent with the best service record for handling those types of issues. These 2 methods can reduce both resolution and response times.
10. Centralized Location for all IT Requests
The help desk platform offers a single location for users and technical staff for handling issues. From the employees’ perspective, they can create a ticket, view its status, and find out when it is resolved. From the IT department’s angle, the platform will act as a source of communication, and a repository of information of current issues logged and solutions attempted.
Conclusion
Through a powerful help desk system in your company, you can offer proactive and comprehensive support to your employees and clients. Your technology problems can be resolved faster, employees can focus on key processes that drive business success and help stay ahead of competitors.
