Is my company ready for an IT Service Desk?
In every organization, there are technical problems that stand in the way of business. Every new software project, manufacturing, hospital, government…all enterprises. Not every corporation or company is prepared to deal with this reality and a lot of waste ensues.
Many businesses need to keep growing and use what they have until the need is greater for a solution that catalogs, tags and keeps track of all issues with time, reporting and history.
If you are getting overwhelmed with support issues and not getting answers to how and where to start fixing, read on.
What is a Service Desk? (SD)
How would you feel if a robot could catalog, ticket, assign tasks, and notify of any time rule or breach? What if it could report to you of trends and findings?
The robot could be a single point of contact for all IT incidents and have programmable “workflows” that would perform when triggered to help with onboarding or offboarding staff.
It could be customized to tie tickets or records to assets, portals, email systems, functions and departments. It would be a powerful relational database of functions that had an organic feel to how issues and incidents were managed and reported.
Users could email the robot or fill in a form to create an incident, problem or request for a function or product. The IT Service desk is the answer to all of these needs, a virtual robot that streamlines your business processes.
There are many different flavors of design but this article is highlighting the Incident Management IT Service Desk and founding one.
Like a wheel with many spokes, you need to understand your unique business challenge first and how to best serve all the different departments.
Some questions to ask when looking at founding an IT Service Desk:
- Does your business get more calls than you can respond to effectively each day?
- Are you getting the same calls for the same technology each day?
- What is the business impact if calls are not answered? How does this affect your productivity?
- Do you know how your IT staff are performing?
- How much money are you willing to spend on a service desk and annual support costs?
A few benefits of a Service Desk
- See issues and problem trends to put into IT roadmap
- Breeds accountability and boosts morale – you have metrics now for incidents
- Have a record of ticketed issues and time spent. Helpful for training and development
- Reporting shows over or under performing IT Staff to address
- Can automatically send surveys to poll user satisfaction which helps at review time objectively
There are companies that only have email and tried to search inside Outlook for trends and tickets. The employees find it very cumbersome and not intuitive, depending on the outlook search function to work properly (which it does not consistently).
There are many products in the market that are created to try and effectively answer all the questions and be the best “Robot” to customize for your help desk needs.