It’s often a common complaint for IT pros in desktop support teams that they are spending more time managing service requests than actual IT support. This is because there is no easy way to track and manage service requests; there’s just too much of complexity around managing service requests when dealt with manually. As enterprises are realizing the value of IT service support solutions to improve their service delivery, there are many small companies that are still depending on disparate channels for logging incidents via phone, email, chat, and even verbal communication, and Excel sheet as a manual workaround for help desk. This is certainly not the most efficient means to handle service requests if you really want to save time and invest that in actual end-user support, and improve productivity. So, what are the complexities faced in IT service request handling and how can IT pros be relieved of all these ad hoc and time-consuming management chores?
#1 Manual Ticket Assignment: Disappearing Time & Disorganized Process
When there is a ticket logged, the first thing you need to be able to do is sort it based on where it came from, what is the type of issue, what is the priority level, and assign it to the right technician who is available and has the skill-set to handle the ticket. Automation is key. Without automating the ticket assignment process, you will end up spending a lot of time analyzing all these parameters manually. With the help of pre-defined ticket assignment and routing logic built into a help desk system, you will be able to streamline the process and ensure each service request gets logged and immediately assigned to the right technician.
#2 A Bitter Tryst with Service Fulfilment Delays & Escalations
Before you start addressing service fulfilment delays, you must ensure you track time spent on incidents. Once you know what your average ticket response time and ticket resolution time are, you can start building baselines and set up SLA-breach alerts. This is being proactive than being reactive. Before you end up causing a delay on a ticket due any unplanned reasons, you will be alerted that you are nearing the SLA timeframe. This will help you make service delivery more seamless and prompt. Escalations are another issue when SLAs are not met. There has to be a strategic approach to planning and assigning an escalation workflow so that there is the next technician, group of technicians, or the next-level support personnel (manager or whoever is in charge) that gets, and the SLA-breach or client complaints are thus escalated.
#3 Ticket Resolution Status: Kept In the Dark
As a help desk technician or a desktop support agent, you need to be able to track and manage the status of tickets from creation to resolution, and also record all details for historical analysis. An Excel sheet is NOT the tool for this job when you have hundreds of service requests pouring in each day and you decide to sit and modify status on a spreadsheet. Whether it’s a singletechnician’s tickets, or tickets for a support team, or entire IT department, a help desk software allows you to capture, track and monitor status of tickets with status management dashboards and notifications.
Help desk software helps you automate and streamline your ticketing management process by providing the flexibility to create your own workflows and dynamic ticket assignment rules. Service request management should not be made complex when there are ample functionality with help desk to simplify that. When you have simplified ticketing management, you would have gained more time for actual IT support and issue resolution.