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6 ways to supercharge the help desk


In early 2016, a credit union implemented an IT help desk system to organize its IT support. With the right blend of forms and process automation, they were able to deliver support and measure key metrics like open tickets that violated SLAs, agent load, agent performance in regard to SLA compliance, and department and category-wise breakdown of tickets.


Over the course of two years, they extended the concept of service management beyond IT to four other business services departments, including HR. With each new enterprise service management (ESM) initiative, this organization streamlined information collection, process automation, and performance measurement.


* By implementing ESM, ticket system participation in this credit union went up by 222 percent in one year. Process improvement, among other initiatives, helped the credit union win a Commitment Award from the Tennessee Center for Performance Excellence in 2018.


This is an example of help desk transformation that effected profound performance differences in one organization — because the organization “supercharged” its help desk with process automation, digitalization, metrics and analytics, and an infusion of purposeful activities that the organization valued. This technology and service approach was then leveraged to other areas of the company.


Other organizations can also supercharge their help desk assets by considering these six best practices:


1. Define a strategic help desk direction and believe in it

“Within the IT department, a lack of leadership is a common reason for help desk frustration,”. “If the leadership doesn't clearly establish the value the help desk offers to business, and instead focuses more on transactional operations, IT help desk personnel may not really know why they have to do what they're doing. IT leadership must explain the difference between just laying bricks versus building a cathedral.”


Many CIOs continue to primarily use the help desk to deflect questions away from IT functions that they consider to be more valuable, even while paying lip service to the value of the service role.


How do you change this?

By defining a service initiative that delivers tangible value to the company and by making the IT help desk an integral part of that strategy.


“In one case, an IT department implemented AI assistance for its help desk and reduced average help desk agent time by two hours per week,” says Stover. “The company implemented a rules-based system that the AI used for reference when it queried historical help desk data and it had a 96 percent hit rate when agents used it to assist them in their jobs.”


2. Secure support and adoption for your help desk initiative

Companies that are still mired in old-school help desk approaches and perceptions must overcome cultural resistance points in the company as well as the investment and technological hurdles.


Transforming the help desk and securing adoption begins at the help desk itself.


To prevent this, CIOs and help desk managers can set service goals and metrics, feedback channels for internal IT systems and other target improvement areas, and customer satisfaction SLAs. They can seat help desk personnel alongside personnel from historically more revered IT disciplines such as database or applications. They can sign off on more robust budgets for help desk investments.


3. Focus on continuous process improvement

“In one case, a company started a chat-box function,” says Stover. “Its purpose was to deflect level one requests away from the help desk. The company ended up redesigning its help desk service portal so the portal could integrate chat with other help desk communications for a more holistic experience for end users and a more complete context for the help desk service personnel to evaluate.”


With digitalization, there is a host of tools that can be integrated into the fabric of a help desk and that can elevate help desk performance. However, the focus should clearly be on whether these solutions improve end user and help desk staff member service experience. If a help desk technology fails to do this, it won't be adopted.


“The IT help desk team can deploy AI bots to respond to user requests and resolve issues very quickly, giving staff time to take care of other high-value activities,” said Menon. “These bots can understand and respond to voice as well as text interfaces, even when help desk personnel are unavailable or busy with other tasks. Machine language (ML) capabilities can offload tasks like manually sifting through huge volumes of data, looking for patterns, and identifying corresponding actions.”


IT help desks can also benefit from employing popular communication and collaboration applications.


“If the help desk team can invest in integrating their tools with the applications their users already use and are well-versed in, that's a win-win for both parties in terms of the value they get out of each other,” says Menon. “An example would be to allow users to raise requests through WhatsApp, rather than forcing them to go through a set of complex forms.”


4. Focus on the end user experience

Your help desk won't succeed if your users aren’t happy.


User feedback on help desk performance should be continuously collected and evaluated. If there are areas where improvements are needed, those improvements should be acted upon without delay.


Second, users should be able to access help desk resources through methods they are comfortable with. This could be chat, or self-service guides, or popup alerts, or collaboration tools, etc.


Finally, invest in skills training for help desk staff. This training should cover communication and interpersonal skills as well as systems knowledge. A well-trained staff is knowledgeable, confident and better suited to offer world-class support to users.


5. Hire the right people

“The most fundamental traits that any help desk employee should possess are empathy and patience,” says Menon. “This willingness to listen and resolve others' problems — coupled with great knowledge of the domain, an eye for seeing problems the right way, and the expertise to find and implement the right solution — make a help desk employee a champion for their users. Moving forward, help desk staff will be even more successful if their experience and expertise allow them to be proactive and build systems that not only handle day-to-day issues, but also forecast the best possible way to solve future problems.”


6. Create a help desk career path

Finally, career advancement opportunities and ladders need to be established for help desk professionals. These individuals need to know they have a future at the help desk if they want to stay there.


Career path development in QA, the help desk area and other unsung IT disciplines is still a pipe dream for many IT departments. Is it any wonder then that individuals — even those who really enjoy the help desk — are reluctant to make a career commitment?


It doesn't have to be this way. “By ensuring raises and promotions and providing professional development, you can offer a great career path,” says Menon.


< above text is an extract from the article published in CIO mag. To read the full article, click here >

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