What Is An IT Help Desk And How Can It Help My Business?

Businesses today are heavily reliant on digital solutions for operations, marketing, security, payments, and more. Because of this, it’s extremely important for businesses to have a capable IT backbone and support system to ensure uninterrupted operations. However, excellent IT support is rarely cheap, which can be a problem for smaller businesses with limited resources. For these organizations, an outsourced IT helpdesk can be the best solution to keep their IT ecosystem running.

How Does an IT Help Desk Work?

An IT Help Desk can provide all the technical support needs of a business's employees and/or customers. It allows users to troubleshoot problems, track and prioritize issues, and get assistance with products, services, or processes. An effective IT Help Desk can help reduce downtime, improve employee productivity, and increase customer satisfaction.

To request technical assistance, employees and customers can either submit a ticket to the Help Desk, or they can search through a knowledge base with help content to find answers on their own. A robust IT helpdesk system can help users with the following:

• Bug fixes on company-issued software
• Questions about proper usage of hardware and software
• Incident monitoring
• Network and VPN troubleshooting
• Login and password problems
• Device compatibility
• Scheduled maintenance, upgrades, and patches

What Are the Common Features of an IT Help Desk?

For an IT Help Desk to provide exceptional support to employees and customers, it must have the following features:

Ticketing system

A ticketing system is a centralized platform that allows IT teams to manage employee conversations and respond to requests from multiple channels. The ticketing system will create a ticket that contextualizes the concern to help support agents resolve issues and provide personalized service. It must also be able to automatically route tickets to the agent best suited to handle the request, which is based on expertise, availability, or workload.

Self-service portals

A self-service portal is a website or an application that allows employees to find information and get help on their own. This can include FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and knowledge base articles. Employees can use the self-service portal to find answers to questions without needing to reach out to an agent.

It’s also a great idea to create a place in the knowledge base for senior-level employees to share their knowledge with new hires or less-experienced peers. This can help the latter get up to speed quickly and prevent them from potentially clogging the helpdesk. This way, the ticket volume in the helpdesk queue becomes more manageable.

Reporting and analytics

IT Help Desk reporting and analytics tools can help businesses understand which areas employees or customers need the most assistance. Businesses can use these tools to track metrics such as ticket volume, response times, and first-contact resolution times. This information can also help them identify areas where their support system can be improved.

Prebuilt dashboards provide real-time helpdesk metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) based on industry standards. This means that businesses can start generating reports right away, without having to configure the tools themselves. Custom reporting lets companies create a personalized view with the metrics most relevant to them. 

What Are the Benefits of an IT Help Desk?

Investing in an IT Help Desk can provide many benefits, such as:

Reduced costs

A modern IT Help Desk system can enable a frictionless agent experience, increase operational efficiency, and reduce operational costs. It helps minimize the recurrence of issues and consolidates requests to be accomplished in the most efficient way possible, ensuring that helpdesk capacity isn’t wasted and downtime is minimized or even eliminated.

Reduced data silos

An IT Help Desk can bring together scattered customer and employee data from various systems and applications into a single location. This facilitates data unification, provides agents with additional context, and breaks down data silos. Removing data silos can help teams stay on the same page and keep the organization running smoothly.

Boosted productivity

IT support issues can be quickly resolved with the right instructions. However, if employees do not know where to find these instructions, frustration levels can increase as they spend more time searching for a solution. An IT Help Desk provides employees with a way to solve their problems in just a few clicks, eliminating the need to tie up IT staff with phone calls and multiple rounds of questions.

Enhanced data security

IT Help Desks often sync with customer relationship management (CRM) software to access personal data, which is why they are often outfitted with high-end security and compliance tools to ensure a complete end-user experience.

Empower your team with an IT helpdesk that they can lean on anytime and anywhere, even while they’re working remotely. Contact our experts today so we can schedule a discovery call and quickly deploy the IT helpdesk arrangement that suits your needs.