Wayne, Author at Help Desk Management Best Practices

Help Desk Multi-channel support: Social Media Strategies

December 9, 2015 Wayne 0

Internal and external customers now expect to reach your Help Desk for customer service and support from any device, at any time, and from anywhere. In today’s Millennial-driven economy, the Help Desk’s response to requests must be immediate and delivered in the customer’s preferred medium. In the past, Help Desk Management and staff only had to monitor traditional channels such as phone and email. A forward looking Help Desk must now have a social media […]

How to Reduce Incident Mean Time to Restore Service MTTRS

October 31, 2015 Wayne 0

What specific areas are you focusing on to reduce Incident Mean Time to Restore Service (MTTRS) of Major Incidents and increase Mean Time between Failures (MTBF) in ITIL at your company? Reducing Incident Mean Time to Restore Service (MTTRS) of Major Incidents and increasing Mean Time between Failures (MTBF) is critical. Reducing MTTRS will decrease the service disruption duration to avoid a loss of sale revenue and productivity. Increasing MTBF in ITIL will improve the […]

Incident Management Communication Plan – Do you have one?

September 2, 2014 Wayne 6

A proactive Help Desk team will have Incident Management Communication Plan in place to follow when an outage to a service occurs. In advance of an outage, it is important to develop a well thought-out Incident Management Communication Plan detailing how people will be initially notified, what information they need, when status updates will be communicated, and what resolution steps occur when a service has been restored. Answer the following questions about the state of […]

The 4 groups important for a Help Desk Manager

August 19, 2014 Wayne 1

Help Desk Manager careers are built on a foundation of communications and strong relationships. It is important to quickly build relationships and collaborate with key stakeholders of your support department to be successful. A new Help Desk Manager needs to have clear lines of communication with at least 4 key stakeholder groups their new department interacts with. These 4 key stakeholder groups for a Help Desk Manager are your boss, the customers you support, the […]

8 steps to mature a knowledge management system

July 27, 2014 Wayne 2

When a customer contacts your Help Desk with a service question or issue, you expect your Help Desk Agents to provide consistent, repeatable, and accurate solutions. If the needed service support information is scattered throughout your company, how can you expect your Help Desk Agents provide timely support? The 8 steps to mature a knowledge management system is the process of identifying, collecting, formatting, training, and using service support knowledge to resolve a customer’s service question […]

The History of the Help Desk

July 10, 2014 Wayne 0

Over the decades and through the history of the Help Desk, we have seen remarkable changes. In the early Help Desk days, Corporate Information Technology systems started with mainframes and user terminals. Applications were centrally managed and used collectively. Mainframes had centralized computer operators that would maintain the mainframe and programmers that would submit program updates. Since the programs were centralized on the mainframe, if one user had an issue with an application, everyone that […]

Help Desk audit program for ticket and call quality assurance

July 7, 2014 Wayne 0

How do you really know your Help Desk agents are providing high quality customer service? As a good Help Desk Manager you implement a Help Desk audit. This will have established customer contact handling procedures, regularly measure customer satisfaction, and have trained your staff on providing great customer service. Proactive Help Desk performance management is more than documenting procedures, measuring KPI metrics, and training staff. To truly find out how well your customer are being […]

How to create an incident management procedure

June 23, 2014 Wayne 0

While each company’s incident management procedure are similar, there are unique factors to be considered to understand how to create an incident management procedure. We have created this incident management procedure best practices step by step guide to help you build a procedure that works for your team and company. We look forward to your comments and questions. Incident Management Title and Change History The incident management procedure title page is pretty straight forward. Include […]

ITIL Change Management and the Help Desk

February 21, 2014 Wayne 1

It is important as a Help Desk Manager or Agent to understand what Change Management is and how it is related to the Help Desk. In this posting we discuss what is Change Management and some of the important aspects of Change Management and the Help Desk. We then discuss what is a Request For Change, the responsibilities of a Change Manager and the Change Advisory Board, and what is a Forward Schedule of Changes. […]

Help Desk Escalation Support Group

July 30, 2013 Wayne 1

You have trained your Help Desks Agents with support skills, your knowledge base is full of solutions, and you First Contact Resolution percentage is seventy percent or better. This still means that thirty percent of all Help Desk contacts (phone, email, and other means) are escalated to another group. What is a Help Desk escalation support group and how does that work? How does a Help Desk Escalation Support Group work? If the Help Desk […]

Help Desk Management Best Practices

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Articles by Wayne