5 Ways an IT Help Desk Can Benefit Your Company
Don’t Think You Need an IT Help Desk? Think Again!
This article first appeared on the GoGenuity.com Blog.
IT help desks help fix technical issues employees experience while performing their assigned duties. From performing password resets to spearheading disaster recovery efforts, IT teams keep workers efficient and productive so that unplanned downtime doesn’t jeopardize operations.
Your business is missing out if it doesn’t have an IT help desk solution that streamlines the process of helping to keep employees working rather than sidelined. You don’t want a situation where your workers encounter problems but don’t receive timely support to resolve their issues.
Continue reading to see five ways an IT help desk can help a company -- and why you need one.
1. Automates Manual Tasks
When you invest in an IT help desk solution, one of the benefits you’ll get is automation. IT professionals wear many hats and perform many functions day in and day out. What IT help desk solutions do is automate labor-intensive functions. By organizing data and streamlining communication, IT help desk software can make it easy for the IT team to help employees.
The IT support team members are tasked with helping employees with any technical issues they’re experiencing. If the process is done manually, it will be less efficient, which means your workers will be less productive. If workers have to wait too long to get the help they need, it will be like having unplanned downtime that will throw a wrench in your operations and cost you revenue.
That’s where IT help desk software comes into the picture. It automates processes and simplifies workflows in a way that can make IT teams more efficient and productive. They’ll easily be able to track issues, keep tabs on status updates, and communicate more effectively with end users. IT teams can use the software to generate tickets and assign these tickets to the appropriate staff. It’s less likely that user requests will fall between the cracks or face unnecessarily long delays.
2. Prioritize Tasks
When offering IT help desk services to employees, it’s essential to have a way to prioritize tasks. Some requests are more severe than others, and it’s important to prioritize issues impacting multiple people over issues affecting one person. Case in point: If a server is down and employees cannot access the resources they need, that technical problem is more important than if one person is having issues connecting to the corporate network.
With an IT help desk solution, your IT team will be able to categorize end-user problems by importance. Quickly and efficiently sorting through requests for help will enable your IT team to tackle the big issues before dealing with the lower-priority tasks that aren’t as pertinent.
Another way an IT help desk can help is by allowing your IT team to direct low- and medium-level requests to junior team members while directing high-level requests to more seasoned members of the team who have the skill set and expertise to handle such requests.
3. Save Money
Investing in an IT help desk is something that will positively impact your bottom line and save you money. According to one source, businesses with operational budgets of $500 million and a 30% spend on salaries could experience a loss of $575,000 in salaries for a workday lost due to downtime. It's tough to have to pay out north of half a million to staff who are unable to work.
Whether or not your business has that sort of operational budget isn’t really the issue. The important thing is that a lot of money can be lost if your business has to pay salaries to workers who can’t do their jobs due to unexpected downtime.
When considering how crucial IT infrastructures are to businesses in this digital area, you can appreciate the importance of equipping IT teams with the tools they need to minimize downtime. You can use an IT help desk solution to more quickly respond to and resolve end-user problems. And being able to prioritize will help your IT team to focus on issues impacting more people.
Another thing to consider is that every issue reported and resolved will be added to a database of issues that your IT team can refer to if similar problems rear their ugly heads in the future. So, when issues happen down the road, they can be fixed faster since a record of the solution can be accessed. In fact, your IT team can create FAQs that employees can access as a self-help option. This can translate into a lot less downtime and a lot more efficiency and productivity.
4. Analyze Trends
Your IT team can also use an IT help desk solution to analyze trends. For instance, you’ll be able to find the types of problems that occur the most often and even when they tend to occur. Your IT team can use the data to figure out if preventative measures are in order to halt problems. This might involve targeted training or other things.
It’s also possible to track your IT team's performance. For instance, you can check how many requests for assistance were resolved and how long it took to address end-user issues. The information you gain can be used to help the IT team perform even better.
5. One Location for All IT Help Desk Requests
It helps to have all IT help desk requests in a single location rather than in various silos that make it cumbersome for people to seek help and for IT staff to provide help. When you use an IT help desk solution, end users can generate a ticket, check up on the status, and find out when their issues have been addressed.
The central location can also be used to share known problems and updates on when the problems will be fixed. It can also be used to provide answers to frequently asked questions so end users can get answers without reaching out to the IT department. That’ll help people get answers faster and free up IT staff to focus on higher-priority issues.
Try Our Next-Gen IT Help Desk
Do you want to get a next-generation IT help desk solution that allows your IT staff to service end users at your company? If so, you need to try our IT help desk solution. In fact, you can request a demo and even get started for free. No credit card is required, and there's no software to download. It's all online. Get in touch when you’re ready for an IT help desk reimagined to meet the needs of businesses here and now. Genuity has what you need.
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