In order to have a successful help desk you need to create cohesion between your internal processes and the expectations placed upon your staff by your customers. Having the right tools for the job, as well as well-honed processes and the right people will help you to achieve this balance. Learn the Tactics to Manage Your IT Help Desk.

These are our top tips for successfully managing your IT help desk and ensure that your employees are empowered and your customers are happy:

Tactics to Manage Your IT Help Desk

• Change your mindset

IT departments often have a reputation for thinking and acting like…well, IT departments. Instead of being completely focused on just the technology and making it work, your team should completely understand the business objectives of your company and know what their role is in facilitating that.

You can start by talking to your stakeholders to gain an understanding of what they do on a day to day basis, what applications are most important to them, when they have deadlines and so on.

This will support your team to be agile and responsive to requests when they come in and to better prioritise work to ensure your organization is successful.

• Provide self-service options, Tactics to Manage Your IT Help Desk

There are many requests that come through the IT help desk so regularly that it is a waste of your time and resources if you are repeating them over and over again.

You can cut down on the ticket queue to your help desk by empowering your customers to find their own solutions to the most common IT help desk questions.

• Improve communication with customers

When people approach you to help them with a problem – no matter how big or small – they want to feel like you take it seriously and you are going to provide assistance.

When you don’t communicate through the process you can cause anxiety for the person who is counting on you to help.

Even if you are working on providing a solution, you should keep the customer appraised and updated to reassure them that their issue is a priority for you. Failure to communicate can lead to a lack of trust and poor perceptions of your team.

• Use DeskAlerts, Tactics to Manage Your IT Help Desk

When you have a known IT issue you probably find that your helpdesk receives many calls from employees with the same questions.

A simple way to alleviate this burden is to invest in DeskAlerts, an internal communications software solution many companies have turned to in order to take the load off their IT help desks.

DeskAlerts works by sending pop-up notifications direct to employees’ computer screens. 

Let them know what the issue is and when you expect usual service to be resumed and you will find that little or no calls come through asking about the issue.