The IT Help Desk - Top 10 Ways Running a Help Desk Can Help Your IT Department

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A help desk is designed to enable IT pros to work more effectively. How? Just put, a aid desk eliminates a lot of pesky manual processes. For instance, many small to medium businesses (commonly referred to as SMBs) demand IT techs to answer telephone calls and manually log challenges, a procedure that can be laborious and time consuming.

A aid desk automates this method by using email. Instead of a user getting to quit what they are doing to call or pay a visit to their IT manager, they can instead just send an email outlining the problem. Then, the assist desk will get and log that concern automatically. This is far more convenient for each parties involved -- not only does it streamline communication, but it also keeps organized, trackable records of all issues that are submitted, plus allows a resolution schedule to be established and communicated.

10 Techniques a Support Desk Assists You

Though there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of reasons a assist desk can make your job a lot easier and your home business more productive, we've whittled it down to the top 10 methods a help desk can simplify an IT pro's job:

1. Function a lot more effectively - Users gain time and maximize their efficiency by virtue of being able to e-mail their assist desk challenges -- and any related updates -- when it is most convenient to them.
   
2. Multitask smarter - IT techs can work on various issues at once. When traveling to a remote component of the constructing, for instance, they can establish who requires assist in certain locations and go to them all in the course of a single trip, creating greater use of their time.
   
3. One-cease assist for your users - Some aid desk systems are paired with a portal that provides your users a single location to develop new tickets, view the status of open tickets and close out troubles that are no longer present. The portal can also be utilised to relay phone numbers, email addresses, and essential network data to your users, maybe decreasing the number of duplicate emails you get when something goes down.
   
4. Track trouble ticket time - Keep track of time spent on a trouble ticket. Reports can be run to figure out how much time technicians are spending on all tickets. Specific techs could turn out to be greater at certain tasks, so trouble ticket assignments can be adjusted to reflect this, speeding up the time it takes to solve the dilemma.
   
5. Group obtain requests - When staff submit aid request tickets for major purchases, you can group these tickets together or run separate reports that consist of all items that want to be bought.
   
6. Prioritize tasks - Unique complications call for unique priorities. When assist desk technicians can significantly more conveniently visually prioritize their tickets, very important support tickets are less most likely to fall through the cracks.
   
7. Don't reinvent the wheel - Quite a few problems are reoccurring and can be swiftly solved based on function done previously. Aid desk software allows technicians to search old tickets to speedily obtain solutions.
   
8. Establish due dates - Keeping track of due dates is considerably simpler with a help desk. Due dates can be automatically or manually assigned, and tickets can be sorted based on the dates the projects need to be completed.
   
9. Auto-assign assist tickets - Help tickets can be automatically assigned. For instance, technician A works on all hardware concerns although technician B works on all software concerns. The can scan incoming tickets and automatically assign them to the appropriate technician based on the content material of that ticket.
   
10. Customize to meet your desires - When telephone-based systems allow particular details to be gathered, a help desk method permits you to collect just as significantly data, organize it better, and do even more with it. Aid desk systems contain a number of built-in information and facts fields and a number of also allow for custom ones to be developed as properly. A company can use this facts to organize their tickets and sort them by these categories. This gives the assist desk a tremendous benefit more than telephone-based systems.

Is a help desk suitable for me?

As this list illustrates, the assist desk is designed to make the IT pros life less difficult. With support desk functionality, interactions are simplified, info is organized, and the procedure is just alot more effective.

The biggest barrier for some businesses to implement a aid desk system is the cost. You could end up spending thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars depending on the technologies. While the typical expense is even more than the typical tiny or medium organization can bear, what option do you have when you require to simplify IT procedures?