How To Improve IT Support?

Improving IT support for your staff and users is the key to improving productivity and engagement.

Employing large teams of IT support can have several pitfalls without the right management strategy in place.

If they are left unsupported, IT staff can easily become less productive and unmotivated. The main objective of improving IT support is to improve engagement and customer satisfaction.

When we talk about increased IT support, we might think of cheaper and faster IT service desk operations.

After the pandemic, there is a hunger for “faster, better, and cheaper” IT support. This recognises key modern business priorities, like:

• Need for agility
• Significance of outcomes and value creation
• Maximisation of employee productivity
• Rising employee expectations
• New ways of working linked to digital transformation
• The commercial effect of the covid-19 and its impact on budgets

All of the above pressures are arising against a backdrop of more demand for IT support services. How can IT support meet the growing expectations and demand, whilst maintaining quality?

How Does Technology Help With IT Support?

As this blog is about improving IT support, your organisation needs more from IT. When making a decision to improve IT support, you need to be cognizant that simply cutting costs or speeding up the processes is likely going to be suboptimal if it adversely affects business outcomes and employee productivity.

While technology is the key to improving the IT desk performance, it happens only if its delivery is done right – with much of what is needed for the success mentioned in the 7 ways to improve your IT support highlighted below.

However, these tricks are more about how IT service desks can change from the traditional mandate of simply being more efficient by “doing more with less” to be all three of the “faster, better, and cheaper.”

7 Ways To Improve Your IT Support

The tip to righting the ship is to act quickly, positively, and decisively. With the right plan in place, you can improve your IT service desk performance over time with just a few tricks.

Here are the seven ways you can boost IT support and desk performance today:

1- Collect the right metrics

Sometimes it is not right to say, “people are complaining,” or, “there are some problems.” That’s the time collecting and analysing data come into action.

Are you noticing a drop in internal customer service levels? Has customer feedback plummeted? Is positive customer experience going down, or hold times creeping upwards? Have the number of First Touch Resolution decreased?

Before you approach your help desk employees, make sure you have the actual data to support your assumptions.

Things could be less serious than your thoughts, or maybe worse than you expected, but it is ideal to know exactly where are you standing before mapping a way out.

2- Define Your Goals

For an IT service desk to function optimally and effectively, you need to define clear goals and objectives for your customer support team.

The goals can include specific approaches to handling customer complaints/queries, daily targets, setting upper-limit for response time, and so on. Once you have set the goals, you must ensure that your team members adhere to them and work toward accomplishing the same.

Furthermore, it is also necessary to have a one-on-one meeting with your technical support team and know the challenges they face while handling customer problems and what is the need to overcome those challenges.

3- Gather The Right Performance Feedback

Consider collecting feedback from your employees (your internal customer service representatives).

This data can be used to discuss specific issues that get mentioned (like poor customer service skills or bad attitudes), but can also be used to build morale.

A customer satisfaction survey (CSAT) with quick thumbs up & thumbs down may go a long way in measuring employee satisfaction with the service desk.

No one wants to fill out 30 questions, so we send a simple email that asks if they’re happy, yes or no. I encourage them to be honest, because if they say it’s great, I won’t do anything. But if the experience was poor, we follow up. There’s no point in sending it if you don’t follow up.” –Bryan Greer, Senior System Engineer at Goya Foods.

Always let your team know about the positive feedback you receive. Encourage your team with letting them know when and where they are doing a great job. Follow up on the negative feedback to learn where service management can improve.

4- Build A Service Catalog & A Self-Service Portal

When the services you offer are clear, employee issues go down, satisfaction rises up and your employees can get help when and how they need it.

A user-friendly service catalogue is an ideal place for customers to order hardware and services they need without consuming valuable time in calling the help desk.

And, a self-service portal offers employees to get the answers they need without wasting help desk workers’ time on phone calls.

By lowering the number of emails & calls to the IT service desk, technical staff members can stay on top of incoming questions without being left behind.

5- Collect Performance Feedback

Like tracking customer metrics is necessary, it’s also important to get internal feedback on help desk performance.

In this case, internal feedback refers to employee feedback that can be used to mention employee-specific issues, if they are facing any problem in the office, what resources are lacking that could help them, and how they could better help desk performance metrics, among other things

You can collect internal feedback by a simple employee satisfaction survey with a thumbs up or down option to track the help desk performance metrics.

For positive feedback, do encourage your employees, and similarly, for negative feedback, talk to your employees to know the areas they need tips for improving.

6- Invest In New Technology

Are you empowering your IT service desk technicians and employees with the latest technology? Old technology can slow down your systems and work processes and provides team members less flexibility to handle any given situation.

With the help of new technology, many of the IT service management operations can now be automated, such as a self-service portal powered by AI.

Many other AI-related technologies like chatbots are saving time for everyone involved, leaving staff members free to takeover only the most urgent cases.

7- Encourage Team Collaboration

We understand you trust your customer support team and their ability to resolve issues. However, we believe when your IT service desk team is encouraged to work together, as one big unified help desk team, you are sure to witness great outcomes.

The shared-inbox feature of a help desk permits your support service management to collaborate and resolve support tickets from a shared dashboard. Next, creating a separate email account for each agent is not going to be an effective solution.

On the opposite side, assigning multiple email accounts to your help desk team is the best option to improve customer service performance.

Your help desk agents can track who is working on what, leave internal notes for other agents, or discuss tickets. The potential of teamwork is definitely limitless!

Ready To Make The Most Of Your Service Desk?

Help desk system has emerged over the years to become an integral part of a business’s weapon of customer service tools.

An emerging inbox is seen as a symbol of a growing business, however, more emails can translate to late replies.

A well-setup help desk can come to help and rescue and declutter your ever-emerging inbox.

As it has been discussed earlier, improving your help desk performance is not rocket science – all you need is just to maintain the right help desk tricks and tips up your sleeves. You can contact us who let you offer IT support that cares and experiences that matter.

IT Service Desk Strengthens Your Customer Service Skills — & Your Customer Service Reps

Suppose any customer comes and puts in a service request to your IT help desk, but the team is facing their own outages or end-user issues.

This type of problem hamper your IT support team and consequently hold up your support – not a great situation for your IT support team or customer loyalty.

An IT help desk that minimises these issues means a smoother employee experience, which changes into a positive customer experience.

So, use the seven tips mentioned above to improve your IT support – you will build an IT support loop that will benefit the entire organisation.

When your customers come up to you for help desk support or technical support, your IT help desk agents will be in a better stage to resolve their issues because they are not struggling with their own internal problems.

How GRIT Consultancy Can Improve Your IT Support

If you are looking to improve your IT support, productivity and engagement of your staff, the team at GRIT Consultancy can help you.

We deploy active listening and share feedback in order to work together in the best way. We are here to help you make better decisions for your business.

For affordable, flexible support packages to suit the needs of any business, both big and small, as well as years of industry experience to ensure you have the best quality services, get in contact today.

Call us now to discuss improving your IT support at +44 (0)20 7550 6581, and we can help you get started.