IT Service Desks need to assist promptly and efficiently. They’re the primary point of contact between the customer and the company, which is why it is essential for all interactions to have successful conclusions. Unfortunately, the IT service desks in most companies are overburdened with service requests and sometimes disorganized.
This can create friction between the callers and the company. It can also compromise the morale of the service desk team and hamper their productivity.
So What Exactly are Service Requests?
More often than not, IT teams receive a range of requests from their customers when it comes to software upgrades, computer enhancements, access to applications and the like. These types of requests are called service requests, and the process through which these service requests are handled is called request fulfilment.
Since various service requests are recurring in nature, IT service desks must follow a set of best practices to ensure the utmost efficiency.
Here are many ways in which IT service desks can improve how they handle incidents and requests.
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1.Understand IT Service Interactions
The first step is to understand what you’re dealing with. Analyzing your current IT service desk interactions carefully will give you a clear idea of what kind of volume the desk receives and how efficiently the team processes it. You need to handle service requests and incident reports differently.
Requests involve a formal query where the customer wants something from the IT service team. This can be something like installing new software, getting new hardware, and other such requests.
Incidents are usually formal complaints or requests of problems with the system. For example, a customer might call to report that their website is down or their software isn’t functioning as it is supposed to. Study the data from your service desk software to analyze the volume of requests and incident reports. It would help if you looked at the key performance indicators like:
- Average initial response time
- Average resolution time
- First call resolution rate
- Number of repeat requests or incidents
- Incident/request reopen rates
- Number of pending queries
- Cost per ticket
- Major incident/request tickets
- User satisfaction rate
All of these factors will give you a bird’s eye view of your entire intake and resolution system. Once you have understood all the interactions, it is easier to develop a system that handles all incident tickets and requests effectively.
2. Offer Multiple Ways to Log An Incident Or Request
Logging a request or incident is the first step of the customer’s interaction with the desk. If this is handled smoothly, you have a good foundation for the entire process. The best way to do this is to provide multiple ways to log a report. Customers should be able to reach the desk through a phone call, messages, emails, or even a self-service portal.
Create a business-facing incident or request form that your team can quickly fill out to collect information from the customer. This helps keep all the data from the interaction organized and can make information sharing easier.
3. Sorting Requests and Incidents
Some incidents or requests are repetitive and don’t require human attention. Some are of low priority and can be handled later. If you have a system in place to sort the different kinds of queries, it will be easier to deal with them productively. Prioritize the most common or popular requests first. You probably have a previous record that provides a successful solution to the query.
Following this process will help you tackle most queries quickly. If an automated system handles most queries, it enables you to save time. This allows the desk technicians to focus on more intensive issues that require human input. Handle requests and incidents that benefit the customer and company first before moving on to the less critical queries.
4. Assign The Right Technician
The last thing you want is for the call to transfer from one technician to another repeatedly. When the technician receives a request or incident ticket, they should assign it to the right expert immediately. This reduces resolution time and increases the chances of customer satisfaction.
If all technicians have the same level of skills and expertise, it is a good idea to use an algorithm to assign tickets to technicians automatically. It eliminates the delay in choosing the right person for the job.
[Also read : ITSM Powered with AI becomes Intelligent Service Delivery for Service desk ]
5. Create a Knowledge Base
A knowledge base of all the information collected from previous interactions can help technicians provide excellent support. Store all data from the interaction like the questions, fulfilment procedures, process owner, reporting, approval process, etc.
IT service desk technicians can pull up this information to serve their customers better. For example, if they are faced with a complex request or incident, they can first look at their knowledge base to see if a similar incident has been recorded in the past. If it has, they can offer the same solution to their customer and close the ticket successfully.
If the incident isn’t on record, the technician needs to escalate the matter and find the solution. The system can then record this solution for future reference.
These steps will help you create a more efficient IT service desk and ensure all support team members are equipped to handle different kinds of queries. IT Service companies like Vyom Labs maintains the pool of certified consultants and follow these steps to provide quality service and support to their customers with increased customer experience.