How To Manage Your IT Help Desk

Increased productivity is just one perk of doing it right.

Ever wonder how some businesses always seem to run like clockwork? Their help desk management might be the answer.

A crucial resource for any organization’s internal processes, IT help desks provide a centralized resource to address service disruptions and provide end user support. How this team handles calls and manages incidents can dramatically influence your customers’ day-to-day productivity, as well as improve employee morale and lead to less downtime and turnover.

Here are six key steps you should know for managing a productive IT help desk.

1. Create a Clear SLAs

First things first: You must have a clear Service Level Agreement (SLA) with your customers, both internal and external. An SLA is a plain-language agreement that defines the services you’ll deliver, the response times they can expect, and your mechanism of measuring performance and displaying IT help desk metrics. An SLA will ultimately prioritize tasks and categorize tickets/requests as urgent, high-priority, medium-priority, or low-priority.

• Maximum Response Time refers to the longest time you’ll take to respond to customer requests in the ticket system, even if a complete resolution will take a few hours or days. It’s calculated from the moment a customer makes a request to the time your IT help desk agent “picks up” the ticket and begins to read it.
• Maximum Resolution Time is the longest it will take to resolve an issue. Other parameters can play into these IT help desk metrics, such as customer response.
• Time Waiting for Support is how long the ticket takes in the hands of a help desk agent before the resolution is achieved. At this point, the ticket is in “open status” and does not require any input from the customer.
• Time Waiting for 3rd Party applies when the customer request requires a third party, a non-help desk team member, to review, approve, or give some input to the customer request.

2. Train Your Help Desk Agents

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (the standard framework for implementing IT Service Management in a business or organization) defines HDI as the industry standard for help desk training. Instead of focusing solely on training your help desk staff, it’s important to make HDI part of your onboarding process. There are two common levels of support within your service desk:

• Level 1 is the first IT help desk support level that handles basic problems.
• Level 2 is an in-detail technical support level, with troubleshooting and investigating included.

3. Set-Up Proper Processes for Your Service Desk Management System

IT help desk tools, like service desk software, should create a new service request ticket for every task. These tools let your team resolve issues on the first point of contact and avoid hand-offs or unnecessary escalations.

It’s important to always keep your customers in the loop, every step of the way, until their issue is fully resolved and closed. Additionally, having a field dispatch service to respond to on-site IT issues when needed is also vital. In general, it’s best to follow IT help desk best practices, especially when implementing processes.

Need more information on the difference between help desks vs. service desks? We cover that topic in detail here.