Insider Information from Help Desk Experts

Today's IT leaders spend a significant amount of time trying to prove the value of their decisions and investments.  Maximizing your Return On Investment (ROI) depends greatly on your ability to successfully reduce costs while finding ways to more effectively manage your resources. The first place you can start is at the help desk. So, how do you maximize help desk ROI at your organization? Here are 3 ways to help you get started:

1. Develop Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
In order to show ROI, you will need to first determine key performance indicators (KPIs) of your help desk. KPIs are the most important measurable outcomes that indicate the success and failure of your help desk. There are industry benchmark KPIs that may be helpful, but to get more out of your investment, you will need to tailor them to match your own organizational needs and then monitor and measure them regularly. If you're looking for a some tips, you can also check out our list of the top 5 key performance indicators to track your help desk performance.

Change has always been a constant within organizations. However, in order to be successful, it's critical that your support team embraces change from the beginning. This isn't always easy to do, but with the accelerated pace of things like technological advancements and competition, embracing organizational change is becoming more important than ever before. Here are 4 ways to help your support team embrace change within your organization.

1. Listen to Your Team
You should measure the team's attitude about the change before the organization makes any changes to better understand which members of the team will embrace the change and which of them will not. Team members who prefer stability will be more likely to work with proven methods, while those who embrace change will be more enthusiastic to experiment with new methods.

Many enterprise organizations hire outsourced help desk teams to save time, money, and improve processes, but do you and your organization know what characteristics to look for in a great help desk outsourcing team?

Watch the 2-minute video below and learn about 5 characteristics that great help desk outsourcing teams possess.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the most important metrics that help you better determine the successes and failures of your help desk support operations. Without them, you can never be quite sure what's working and what's not working. Also, selecting and measuring the right KPIs will allow the help desk support team to focus their efforts on what’s most important to the organization.

How do you measure the performance of your help desk support team?  How do you determine the right KPIs to measure? There are many useful metrics that can be applied to evaluate your help desk support team, but here are the five top key performance indicators we recommend incorporating into your evaluation.

1. Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is the reason for maintaining a help desk support team, making this is the ultimate KPI. Measuring customer satisfaction is not always easy, so one of the most direct means of measurement is to send out a survey for your customers to rate and review your help desk support services, then compare the number of completed feedback forms with what you actually sent out. It's best practice to include different questions in the forms that you will need your customers to fill.  

Having an internal help desk team is a great way for an organization to streamline its processes and become more efficient and productive. However, these same internal help desk teams also have to deal with several hurdles brought forward by the organization. Here are 5 of the most common hurdles that internal help desk teams face.

1. The Help Desk Doesn't Have Buy-in from Upper Management
Some organizations do not make a serious commitment to their internal help desk teams. Due to a lack of understanding, some in upper management don't connect the dots and see how important the help desk team is to restoring productivity to employees that drive the company's core products and services. As a result, management is now forced to write repeatable processes designed to fix issues and serve the enterprise instead of being reactive in a crisis.

Oftentimes, the need for an internal help desk team becomes apparent when a business-critical function is down and it has negative implications on the organization. As a result, the help desk team is forced to write repeatable processes designed to fix issues and serve the enterprise instead of being reactive in a crisis.

There are many ways an outsourced help desk team can make an organization more efficient and more productive, so it's no wonder why outsourcing help desk services is considered one of the best  decisions an organization can make. 

Watch the 2-minute video below and learn about 4 benefits an outsourced help desk team can bring to your organization: 

Everyone feels overworked in one way or the other.  Even if you love what you do, things always seem to have a way of creeping up on you when you least expect it.  It is the same in the world of help desk support, as an overworked internal help desk team can have a major impact on productivity and the quality of support given.

In addition, research shows that overworked help desk teams can suffer from something called "compassion fatigue", which can lead to customers being treated more like numbers and figures instead of actual people. This compassion fatigue may also cause your help desk team to suffer from things like disengagement, anxiety, and total burn out just to name a few. So making sure this compassion fatigue isn't seen and felt by your customers is imperative to the success of your organization.

Here are three ways an overworked internal help desk team can impact your customers:

When an organization realizes that there is an opportunity to save time, money, and improve processes, there is significant value in hiring a team that can achieve this in the fastest and most efficient way possible. This is why more and more enterprise-level organizations are focusing on help desk outsourcing and hiring a team of experts to handle their help desk services. However, to truly see the value of an outsourced help desk support team for your organization, you will need to first determine what support you will actually need. Here are 4 ways to help determine your help desk outsourcing needs:

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the most important measurable outcomes that not only keep your help desk outsourcing team on track to achieve its goals, but can also indicate the success and failure of your help desk support operations.

Watch the 2-minute video below and learn about 5 top key performance indicators (KPIs) to track your help desk team performance in 2019.

New technologies can offer many benefits to organizations, including getting and staying ahead of competitors, growing profits, and becoming more efficient. However, new technologies also bring unknown possibilities that come with change, and that can be difficult for many employees within the organization to embrace. So, how can you successfully implement new technology in your organization with as little resistance as possible?

Here are 4 tips to successfully implement new technology in your organization:

1. Communicate
One of the most effective ways to get your organization to embrace a new technology is to communicate with them.  Talk to them about how the new technology will work and the benefits it will bring, while at the same time, creating an environment where they can provide feedback. By providing feedback, employees might come up with genuinely good ideas for implementation that you hadn't even thought of. Consider using focus groups from different departments that will allow them an opportunity to be heard and express their feelings on the matter, as well as giving you a chance to empathize with their thoughts.