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5 Proven Ways to Optimise Your IT Support Desk & Increase Its Efficiency

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26 January 2021

Over the years, IT service desks have evolved to become an efficient tool to deliver quick support to your employees and customers, whenever required.
However, with businesses IT departments and requirements growing at a faster pace, the need for constant assistance from IT support providers has only increased; not to mention the increased pressure on them to attend and resolve as many tickets as possible.
What’s more, due to the transition to remote working caused by the pandemic, many IT teams are finding it difficult to offer effective support to their organisations.
That said, to enable your in-house IT team to focus more on business-critical deliverables rather than wasting their time and resources on repetitive issues, the IT professionals at Redpalm have put together 5 proven ways to reduce the ticket volume.
Let’s take a look at how you can optimise your IT support desk while increasing its overall efficiency.

1. Evaluate Your Incoming IT Service Requests to Identify Trends

When it comes to IT issues, most employees will face at least a basic technical glitch whilst at work; password resetting, for example.
It is therefore essential to identify any recurring IT issues and requests that require manual intervention and use that information to bring down the number of incoming ticket requests.
The goal here is to recognise the trend of common problems faced by employees in the organisation and accordingly optimise your IT support desk.
Once you have a fully optimised and robust service desk, you can easily generate reports to track request metrics, such as the number of tickets received, average time spent on each request, the availability of IT teams and other data regarding ticket volumes. Once you’ve compiled all the necessary information, your in-house IT team can sift through it and assess the same to understand the following:

  • What types of IT requests is your team receiving?
  • If the same issues are being brought up by your employees from different departments, can your IT team look into automating those?
  • If your requests can’t be automated, can they be standardised whenever possible?
  • Can these IT requests be resolved using self-help?
  • If they can be solved by following simple steps, how can you encourage your employees and customers to look for solutions posted in the common portal and resolve the issue themselves?

Once you’ve assessed the requests and identified a specific trend, your IT team will have a better idea of the common issues, their possible origins and even its root causes.
However, if you don’t have the required resources or are short on time, you can seek assistance from the professional IT support providers at Redpalm.

2. Create a Detailed and Actionable Knowledge Base

Now that you’ve identified the common IT requests hampering the efficiency of both your IT support team and employees, you can start creating a comprehensive knowledge base.
Make sure you’re producing and adding helpful content to bridge the knowledge gaps leading to your most common issues. 
When it comes to developing an actionable knowledge base, you could choose from various options like e-books, case studies, live training sessions, explainer videos, FAQs, newsletters and so on.
Additionally, ensure that the added content is in an easy-to-understand format.
To find out more about how you can create useful case studies and FAQs, click here!

3. Develop a Self-Service Portal Alongside Your Knowledge Base

Another way to optimise your IT support desk is developing a self-service portal to reduce time and miscommunication in handling requests (from initiating requests to resolving them) to a fraction of the time. A self-service portal can enable your employees and customers to look for a solution without any external assistance.
In order to encourage your employees to leverage this service, you need to ensure that the portal is user friendly and easy to access.
You also need to make sure the portal has:

  • The same experience across devices
  • A seamless user interface that can adapt to the display based on the user’s journey
  • Easy-to-access search features
  • Easy and intuitive navigation

For thorough and professional assistance, you can get in touch with our IT specialists today!

4. Outsource Your 1st Line IT Support to a Managed Services Provider (MSP)

An alternative to creating knowledge base and self-service portals, outsourcing your 1st line IT support, user training and account setups to an MSP is perhaps the best way to take the pressure off your in-house IT team.
Not only will it help you optimise your IT support desk but also improve the overall efficiency of your business while resolving issues quickly.
To find out more about how IT outsourcing can benefit your business, click here.

5. Find the Root Cause of Your IT Requests

Even after implementing all the initiatives that we discussed above, if your IT team is still receiving the same set of issues, it’s highly likely that there’s a systemic problem.
If this is the case, you could consider investing your resources into identifying the root cause of those reoccurring issues and finding a permanent solution.
Moreover, rather than simply responding to these issues as they arise; try preventing them from happening again.

Get in Touch With Redpalm for Professional IT Support Services

Incremental IT problems can cause productivity issues for both your employees and in-house IT teams.
However, by partnering with the right IT support provider like Redpalm, you could not only optimise your IT support desk but also automate your entire workflow to enhance the efficiency of your business.
Give us a call on 0333 006 3366 or drop us a line at info@redpalm.co.uk to find out how our IT professionals can help!

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