In times when providing a quality service adds valuable points for the competitiveness of businesses, service desks need to implement new strategies that help them increase productivity.
This reality has caused a lot of stress for IT agents. Since they must not only answer a lot of requests, but also they need to maintain a high level of performance.
However, achieving this goal is not an impossible task. In this article, we will show you ten tips that will help you increase the productivity of your service desk.
What are the benefits of increasing the productivity of your service desk?
Optimizing the work of your IT agents can bring great advantages, such as:
Prevent potential problems: It will help you increase the number of tickets that your service desk solves daily. It will also allow you to detect new trends and anticipate future issues that may affect your business.
Measure and improve customer experience: By increasing the effectiveness of your service desk, you can monitor better your users’ interactions. Thus, it will be easier for you to know the challenges they face and provide a quality service.
Create a knowledge library: Service desks manage a large amount of information daily, which can benefit internal and external users. Documenting requests not only improve ticket management, but also bring benefits for the new agents.
10 tips to increase the productivity of your service desk
1. Understand your users’ expectations:
If you want to increase the productivity of your technical service, you should know what your users expect from your service desk.
In this case, we recommend you explore the following questions: Do my clients expect a faster resolution time? Do my users want to have self-service options? Do they need to use more modern IT tools?
Knowing this information will help you a lot to establish your company’s SLAs, and you will be able to create more realistic goals for your IT team. Therefore, agents will know where to focus to meet your user’s needs.
2. Facilitate access to your knowledge base:
In today’s digital world, knowledge shouldn’t be hard to find. Speeding up access to this information can help you increase the productivity of your service desk.
To improve this process, we recommend:
- Create support content with the help of experts.
- Encourage dialogue and collaboration among your company’s employees.
- Perform a robust proofread for each support article.
- Create a community where users can share their knowledge.
3. Create an internal knowledge base:
When we talk about strategies to increase the productivity of service desks, we cannot ignore the importance of knowledge bases. These portals are a repository where users can find structured content to solve their problems.
The advantage of this strategy is that it gives agents more time to focus on solving urgent issues. Also, users will be able to solve their requirements themselves, without having to open a ticket.
However, if you want to succeed in creating a knowledge base, you must answer these questions:
- Is the self-help portal intuitive enough for new employees?
- How can we make support articles easier to understand?
- How can we structure the content to improve its SEO?
Answering these questions will help you improve greatly your users’ self-service experience.
4. Attend to requests according to their priority:
IT support requirements can be differentiated according to their priority. For example, if your company has multiple servers down, you need to repair them quickly to restore internal processes. Instead, when a user requests a new USB mouse, we can take it as a low-priority case.
You can simplify this process by using software to set the tickets’ priority. This will prevent the most urgent cases from being ignored, and increase the productivity of your agents.
5. Create and share your service catalog:
Creating and sharing a catalog of technical services should be a priority for your service desk. Since this information will help users to know the types of services available in your company.
In addition, when you create an IT service catalog, you get the following benefits:
Consistency in service delivery: It helps stakeholders, managers, agents, and users to be aligned with your company’s objectives.
Decrease the number of tickets: Users will always have doubts about how technical services are provided. By knowing this information, you can greatly reduce the number of support cases.
Cost reduction: Having a catalog of services will allow you to automate multiple processes. This will help you manage your requests efficiently, even if you have a small team.
6. Make sure to get tickets escalated correctly:
With an escalation plan, you can ensure that urgent requirements are always assigned to the right team.
Users will also know how their case is being handled. Since you can tell them that their problem is in good hands and that it will be solved quickly.
7. Focus your KPIs on user satisfaction:
Instead of focusing on seeing how your business is growing, pay more attention to the opinion of your customers. This will help you understand better the challenges they face and how you can improve their experience.
We recommend you to focus on the following metrics:
- Customer satisfaction.
- Volume of tickets per communication channel.
- Average response time.
8. Train your agents:
Training your team regularly is vital to increase the productivity of your service desk. Since a well-trained agent will be able to solve more cases without having to constantly escalate them.
You can train your team to improve their communication skills or offer them an ITIL certification. This way, you can provide a consistent service based on best practices.
9. Align your service desk with your company’s goals:
When members of different teams work together to reach a goal, you obtain better results, so we recommend you to ask other departments how the IT team can help them achieve their goals.
For example, you can help the sales team by protecting sensitive customer information or creating workflows to automate their processes.
10. Increase productivity by implementing new systems:
Implementing an IT solution may seem like a long-term project, but it’s a simple process if you know where to start. If you want to implement a new tool, you can focus on the size and objectives of your service desk.
For example, if your team needs help coordinating their tasks, we recommend implementing a service desk software. This tool not only manages requests through tickets, but also streamlines the allocation of assets, SLAs, and various ITSM processes.
With this system, you can also track incidents, improve agent communication and create reports to obtain valuable information.
If you want to implement this solution in your business, Freshservice is your best option. This system will help you save time by managing your tickets, and automate repetitive processes.
Additionally, it has a high level of customization and facilitates collaboration with other departments.
Are you ready to increase the productivity of your agents?
At GB Advisors, we help you integrate this and other technological solutions to simplify your business processes. In addition, we offer personalized attention through the installation and configuration process of any software.
You will also receive free advice from our group of experts, who will guide you step by step so that you can make the most of every tool. Contact us now!
