Four Easy Ways to Create a Chaos-free Help Desk

In my previous post, I listed some best practices for help desk IT pros to follow to save time resolving issues. The responses I received from that post made me realize that the best solution for one IT organization may not necessarily be the same for another. An organization’s size, business model, functional goals, organizational structure, etc. create unique challenges for those charged with running the help desk function, and these factors directly affect IT support priorities.

With this knowledge in mind, I decided to take a different approach for this post. Below, I have listed some of the easy ways that help desk organizations – irrespective of their differences – can improve their help desk operations through automation to create a chaos-free IT support environment.

1. Switch to centralized help desk ticketing
   Receiving help desk requests from multiple channels (email, phone, chat, etc.), and manually transferring them onto a spreadsheet creates a dispersed and haphazard help desk environment. Switching to a centralized help desk ticketing system will help you step up your game and automate the inflow of incidents and service requests.
2. Automate ticket assignment and routing
   Managing help desk operations manually can lead to needless delays in assigning tickets to the right technician, and potential redundancy if you happen to send the same requests to multiple technicians. To avoid this, use a ticketing system that helps you assign tickets to technicians automatically, based on their skill level, location, availability, etc.
3. Integrate remote support with help desk
   With more people working remotely, traditional help desk technicians have to adapt and begin to resolve issues without face-to-face interactions. Even in office settings, IT pros tend to spend about 30% of their valuable time visiting desks to work on issues. By integrating a remote support tool into your help desk, you can resolve issues remotely, taking care of on- and off-site problems with ease.
4. Resolve issues remotely without leaving your desk
   A recent survey by TechValidate states that 77% of surveyed help desk technicians feel that using remote support decreased their time-to-resolution of trouble tickets. Using the right remote support tool helps you easily troubleshoot performance issues and resolve complex IT glitches without even leaving your desk.

These are some of the simple yet powerful ways that organizations can create a user-friendly help desk. Are you managing your help desk the easy way or the hard way?

To download this infographic, click here. Share your thoughts on how you reduce workload and simplify help desk support in the comments section.