Your business’ service desk is an important part of your employee service ecosystem. As the main point of contact and resolution, ensuring it stays in top shape is essential. However, knowing exactly how to achieve this status can be puzzling.
Fortunately, there’s a way to demystify the process. By focusing on the aspects of your service desk with the most productivity potential, you can take your service delivery to the next level.
In this article, we’ll cover how optimizing your service desk performance can be a valuable change. Then, we’ll go over three key tips to help you maximize your return on investment (ROI) from your ITSM solution.
The Value of Optimized Service Desk Performance
Improving any part of your business’ infrastructure and operation aspects will likely have a positive effect on your bottom line. Ensuring your employees have all their IT needs and requests met with a stable production environment and IT services is key in service delivery optimization.
For example, a well-run help desk can process issues quicker and with greater accuracy. This may in turn lead to increased customer and employee satisfaction. Technicians who are fully equipped and empowered to do their jobs may feel more appreciated by your company as a whole.
When coupled with strategies such as robust employee onboarding procedures, this recognition can lead to lower turnover rates.
3 Key Tips To Boost Your Service Desk Performance
Your help desk is likely a complex, interrelated system unique to your company. Nevertheless, there are a few key performance optimization tips most businesses can benefit from.
1. Track and Compare Key Metrics Regularly
Analytics are vital to countless industries. However, not all data is useful. Focusing on metrics with minimal implications can needlessly slow down your work. You should prioritize your analysis to ensure you address the most vital issues first.
If you’re not sure which metrics are most critical to your service desk performance, and which ones would “move the needle” most, consider beginning with your goals. For example, let’s say meeting SLAs and lowering the amount of weekly or monthly SLA breaches is an important goal for you right now. Focusing on the reports and metrics that can help you identify benchmarks across different locations or technicians can help you pinpoint which of these would need more support, training, or tools.
This will enable you to see trends side-by-side. As long as the approach remains methodical, you can focus on specific issues while still keeping an eye on the bigger picture.
Data is rarely useful by itself. Understanding how you can apply your newfound knowledge is essential. We also recommend you make a plan for the use of these metrics. An example of this could be implementing further training for support technicians if resolution times fail to improve.
2. Use Your Knowledge Base to Reduce Time to Resolution and Increase Employee Satisfaction
Choosing top-notch technology is essential to help retain your employees. However, having employees who can confidently use it is just as important. Consider investing in robust training programs for your technicians and digital transformation courses for your employees. For example, 81% of employees who received training believe it increased their productivity.
If you’re not sure what areas your employees need help in, one powerful way is to review your knowledge base performance and usage.
A knowledge base provides accessible self-service solutions to employees 24/7. Well-written documentation and self-service articles can help your employees understand the cause of their issues and avoid them in the future, or repair them on the spot, without waiting for technicians to get to these the next day or after the weekend.
3. Fully Leverage Your Service Desk Automation Capabilities
Service desk automation is an invaluable growth multiplier for IT teams. From mitigating service delays, shortening wait and downtimes, to helping your employees and customers make the most from your product and solutions, ensuring business continuity is at the core of the ITSM practice.
Service desk automations such as automatic assignment or prioritizing of tickers can go a long way to helping you achieve your service and business goals.
Using the ITSM system’s robust automation rules can help not only organize and accelerate service during business hours, but also over the weekend and holidays—the time where the Murphy’s Law is more active than ever: if something bad can happen, it often will. For example, by configuring automatic time-based notification rules, your technicians can enjoy their time off, knowing if something critical happens, they’ll get a notification directly to their mobile device, day or night. This capability can also be set to notify all relevant stakeholders at the same time, providing real-time visibility into the ticket’s status and latest updates.
Getting real-time notifications can help your team stay ahead of the curve, provide employees with workaround solutions while working on a more permanent fix, and ensure business continuity at times of disruption.
Alternatively, you may have employees who mostly work from home these days. You know they some of the provide Tier 1 support for important customers. To make sure you’re doing everything you can to support them remotely, you can automatically prioritize the tickets coming in from the group as “High.”
Conclusion
Your business’ success relies on the productivity and satisfaction of your employees. The more you capitalize on your Service Desk’s reporting, analytics, automation, and self-serve capabilities, the more value you get it from it, and the more satisfied and productive your teams will be.
In this article, we shared three key tips to help boost your help desk performance:
- Track and compare key metrics regularly
- Use your knowledge base to reduce time to resolution and increase employee satisfaction.
- Fully leverage your service desk automation capabilities