The Art of Managing an IT Help Desk

Building a Help Desk from scratch can be challenging. Turning around a Help Desk team with performance issues may seem impossible. You may discover that you must update your Help Desk ticket categories, reporting, mission statement, processes, and other areas. However, assuming your role as a Help Desk Manager with defined ITIL-based processes, positive direction, coaching, and leadership, you can succeed in building a world-class customer support team delivering real value to the business. Investing time, energy, and knowledge into team building, support process development, and customer service excellence can be a very rewarding journey. There are many areas where improvements can be made.

Help Desk Management – Solid Help Desk management practices based on industry-standard processes are critical for an efficient, well-performing, and customer-focused Help Desk. Author Wayne Schlicht of the Help Desk Management book states, “The challenge for a manager is to know what those industry standards are and how to introduce them to your team.” Help desk management is all about customer service. It’s about working with people, helping them solve their problems, and getting them back up and running again.

Help Desk Ticket CategoriesEvery Help Desk needs a ticket classification scheme to properly handle the customer’s issues when they contact the Help Desk for support. Applying proper ticket classification immediately when a Help Desk ticket is created enables the support agent to leverage more advanced resolution enabling tools. Help Desk Managers turn to the definitive book Effective Help Desk Ticket Categories: Step-by-step project guide for ticket category assistance.

Organizational and Support StructureThe Help Desk support structure determines how customers are handled and how information flows within the department. This includes defining contact channels used, hours of operation, language supported, customer base location, security practices, and many other items.

Mission StatementA mission statement is the cornerstone of your company by communicating its purpose. It defines why your company exists, what it does, and how it does it. Our article can help you create a department mission statement that incorporates your company’s goals, objectives, and values.

Take a Free Help Desk Maturity Assessment – We offer a Help Desk maturity assessment for free!. A maturity assessment for the Help Desk will focus on key core areas to gather information. The assessment will use a maturity assessment scale to rank each of these core areas and determine their maturity level.

Shift Left Help Desk support – A Shift left Help Desk means shifting IT support closer to the customer. The idea is to move IT support work from IT engineers and developers to lower-cost Service Desk agents. Learn more about shift left to reduce the overall cost of your IT department and free up IT engineers to work on more productive project work.

Performance Reporting and Help Desk MetricsLearn what the important Help Desk key performance indicators (KPI) are and how they are used by management to understand how the team is performing. We cover important steps to ensure you capture accurate data to measure, manage, and implement continuous improvement efforts.

Help Desk Management Channel on YouTube – Subscribe to our new YouTube channel and enjoy our Help Desk Management videos. We provide solid Help Desk management practices based on industry-standard processes. These videos will assist a manager in understanding what those industry standards are and how to introduce them to your team. Help desk management is all about customer service. It’s about working with people, helping them solve their problems, and getting them back up and running again.

Social Media StrategiesCustomers use social media such as Twitter and Facebook to ask technical questions, complain about products or services, and report outages or service interruptions. Understand how Help Desk social media strategies can be used to monitor and respond more effectively to your customers.

Incident Management Best PracticesAn incident is an event not part of the standard operation of the service causing an interruption toHelp Desk Management book the quality of the service. Incident Management aims to return the service to normal functionality quickly while minimizing the impact on the business. Understand the components of an incident management program and best practices to implement a program that works for your team and company.

Knowledge ManagementKnowledge Management systems make service support information immediately available to your agents to answer the customer’s question or resolve their service issue on first contact. A robust and mature Knowledge Management System enables the support team to deliver greater business value more efficiently.

MTTRReducing Mean Time to Restore Service (MTTRS) of Major Incidents and increasing Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is critical. This chapter will help you reduce MTTRS to decrease the service disruption duration and increase MTBF to improve the up-time availability of your services. Our MTTR recommendations will improve the IT Infrastructure, services, and supporting organization’s capability, enabling the business to satisfy its objectives.

Help Desk Audit ProgramEnsure agents are providing high-quality customer service. Learn how to implement and run a quality assurance audit program by reviewing calls and tickets on a regular schedule using a standard methodology.

Help Desk MarketingThe services offered by your Help Desk have value only if they are being consumed. Customers need to know what services are available and how to request them. Learn how to get started marketing the Help Desk.

Total Contact OwnershipThe principle of Total Contact Ownership is whoever takes the first customer issue will own it until it is resolved. Find out the benefits of Total Contact Ownership to ensure customer issues are addressed and resolved promptly.

At BuildaHelpDesk.com, we provide information to improve your processes, allowing resources to be reallocated to new value-creating work. This allows the company to stay profitable and competitive in today’s marketplace.