How to Improve Efficiency in Your IT Service Desk

Your IT service desk plays a crucial role in your organization, resolving internal technological problems so that people across all departments can remain productive and benefit from consistent uptime. It may function acceptably as is, resolving most issues and keeping your systems up and running most of the time, but even so – it could probably stand to be more efficient.

Higher efficiency in your IT service desk can help you save time, save money, and boost productivity simultaneously. It can even help you improve employee satisfaction and employee retention when executed properly.

So how can you do it?

Use AI (and Better Tools All-Around)

IT service desk AI can instantly make things easier. With an AI powered engine at the center of your IT service desk, you’ll be able to process queries much more quickly, employ automation, issue direction and guidance, and ultimately resolve queries faster. You’ll also be able to reduce your dependency on human employees to carry out these tasks, lowering your labor costs and freeing up your employees so they can focus on more important responsibilities.

Similarly, you can use better tools all-around. Better communication platforms, more robust knowledge base platforms, and other high-tech tools can greatly accelerate your IT service desk.

Create a Library of Resources

It’s important to create a comprehensive library of resources for all your relevant policies and important information. You can use it to train your conversational AI platforms. It can be an ongoing reference and a training resource for your human IT service desk workers. You may even be able to open it up so that employees throughout your organization can consult these materials and solve their own problems.

Of course, developing this library of resources can be challenging, especially if you don’t have many resources to start with. But it’s typically well worth expending the effort, including for all the ongoing changes you’ll need to make in the near future. With this single source of truth (SSOT) in place, there will be little, if any ambiguity to slow down and complicate your IT service desk.

Anticipate the Most Common Problems

One of the most important things you can do to streamline efficiency in your IT service desk is to anticipate the most common problems and issues that your employees are going to face. Depending on the size of your organization, you may end up fielding hundreds of similar requests in the span of a single day; if you’re able to rapidly process these and resolve the issues with lightning-fast turnaround, things are going to flow much more smoothly. However, if you don’t have a consistent approach to these common issues, or if you don’t anticipate these issues, you’ll be on the back foot when resolving them.

Quickly Prioritize Issues

A priority matrix can help you figure out the best strategy for categorizing incoming queries based on priority; traditionally, the priority matrix forces you to consider both urgency and importance. An issue is urgent if it needs to be resolved quickly. An issue is important if it has a significant bearing on large numbers of people or if it directly impedes the achievement of key business goals. Issues can be both important and urgent, only important or only urgent, or neither important nor urgent.

Even if you choose a totally different system of prioritization, you need to have some system in place. This way, even if you’re overrun with tickets, you’ll know which tickets are necessary to address first.

Educate and Train Your IT Service Desk Staff Members

Even if you’re using AI and machine learning, it’s important to educate and train your IT service desk staff members. If your human agents have more knowledge and experience, they’ll be able to resolve even the most complicated issues with relative ease. They’re also going to be more confident and more satisfied with their jobs.

Collect Data and Analyze It to Improve

Finally, work on collecting more data and analyzing it, so you can improve your IT service desk even further.

Pay especially close attention to the following:

• Volume patterns. What kind of ticket volume are you seeing? How does that ticket volume change from day to day and from week to week? Are there any specific patterns that you should be analyzing?
• Ticket channels. Which ticket channels seem to be the most popular? Are you able to manage things in a more streamlined way if one channel is used more frequently?
• Response times. First response time is a commonly tracked KPI in customer service and in IT service desks, and for good reason. Fast response times are imperative for user satisfaction and quick issue resolution. If and when you detect slow response times, can you tie them back to any particular platform, channel, or individual?
• User satisfaction. You should also conduct surveys to analyze user satisfaction. When your employees make requests, are they generally satisfied with the resulting outcomes? If not, what suggestions do they have for improvement in the future?

There’s no such thing as a perfect IT service desk, but with these strategies, you can maximize efficiency and serve your users more effectively. And if you commit to ongoing improvements, your KPIs are only going to get better.

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