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If your answer to any of the above is in the affirmative, it is high time you switched to a single-interface  IT Service Desk  that is crucial for any business to survive the rising technological intricacies and business-related problems.

Maintaining Manual Spreadsheets is Tedious and Error-Prone

Creating crucial reports to deduce important business decisions, for instance churning out a report of the most frequently raised incidents by customers, would take a lot of manual digging into the sheets and counting before anyone can come to a definite conclusion. Manual maintenance of service requests in spreadsheets is not just tedious but is also prone to errors. Any new entry or change in the spreadsheet gives rise to the probability of another error creeping in that can have a ripple effect and can proliferate across the spreadsheet. Moreover, with spreadsheets you run the risk of potential loss of data as they are volatile.

E-mails go Off-Track

E-mail is undoubtedly one of the best modes of effortless and real-time communication between customers and the service providers in a business. But, some requests (in the form of e-mails), even the urgent ones can get buried in a chockablock mailbox with humongous volume of e-mails. Even a well-intentioned help desk agent can tend to drop a few customer requests here and there while trying hard to keep up with the voluminous mails coming in. Its high time you streamlined your communication system.

Limited Means to Contact

Gone are the days when your customers would call in and meekly wait for long durations on phone to get in touch with a service desk executive and get their issues addressed. Modern-day customers look forward to Multi Channel Support wherein an organization offers not just phone and email but also contemporary support channels, such as a Knowledge Base, Social Media, Forums and Live Chats among others, to get their concerns addressed with minimal waiting time.

Disconnect between Internal Teams

Even with an efficient help desk, taking up and processing tickets meticulously and on time, there may be a disconnect between different departments that an organization comprises of. For instance, the sales team would not be aware of what the engineering team is up to and vice versa. To help the internal departments synchronize seamlessly, and to get a bigger picture of customer issues, it is imperative to have a software solution in place that assists your organization in working as a team to meet business objectives.

Multiple Disconnected Software Systems

Multiple Software Systems entail added probability of blunders and replication of tickets, which further results in duplication of effort and waste of time. Using too many disconnected tools can create complications for your service desk team and adversely impact the organization’s business. This arrangement needs to be replaced with an all-in-one software solution that can be unified with most of the popular CRM tools today in a seamless fashion.

If you identify with any of the challenges discussed above, its high time you did away with your traditional manual spreadsheets or multiple software applications to track and resolve multiple customer issues. The need of the hour is a versatile all-in-one application suite having a single user interface, that blends coherently with the mainstream CRM and other social media tools.

The IT Service desk serves as a Single Point Of Contact between the Users and their IT Service Provider for workaday activities. It covers a broad spectrum of serviceability including – management of incidents, attending to service requests, handling outages, software licensing etc. which qualifies it as a single place for users to turn to for most of their IT related requirements. Now let us have a look at different ways in which an IT Service Desk boosts the agility of your business: -

Appropriate Routing of Tickets raised

A competent Service Desk system categorizes and sub-categorizes an incoming ticket based on the request type and automatically assigns the ticket to an appropriate Service Desk team. The automated routing of tickets towards related personnel, based on attributes like - technicality, skill-set of the responsible team, urgency and impact on the business, optimizes bandwidth, efficiently manages the customer support queue, and saves a lot of time that earlier used to get wasted in manual sorting and delegation of tickets raised.

Optimized Resolution of Business issues

An analytics-driven IT Service Desk tends to take your business a few notches higher as it is based on significant trends and patterns in service requests from customers. It helps you in making smart business decisions by proposing fastest resolutions to deliver outstanding customer service in record time. All you have to do is to look at the data and then make the right decisions. This is fast, simple and efficient. What else you can expect from an IT Help Desk software applications.

Automation of Repetitious Tasks

An IT Service Desk eliminates irrelevant downtime and makes the life of service agents easier by letting automated workflows handle common repetitive issues and saving agents from reinventing the wheel. For example, if you (as an agent) encounter multiple incidents raised in your system regarding a “feature request”, you could select all such tickets, mark them as feature requests and assign them to the Product Management team – all this with the click of a button!

Increased Productivity of the Staff

An efficient IT Service Desk software is adept in tracking a ticket raised and the time an agent takes in resolving it, end – to – end. This data can help in boosting the productivity of the support personnel and maintaining an excellent resource utilization rate. Having said that, it becomes necessary to add that trying too hard to maximize the utilization of an agent could result in increased turnover rates.

Prioritizing Tasks based on Severity

A capable IT Service desk software system is adept in prioritizing tickets raised by customers on the basis of the severity of the impact it has on day-to-day business operations. For example, the severity of a ticket with “My server is down so I can’t run reports” is definitely greater than the severity of the one with “please replace my faulty mouse”! This implies that disruption of services has a higher priority over other requests and needs to be addressed on an urgent basis. Smart systems also facilitate automatic raising of an incident on alarms and any other such events. Also, the self-service portal for users helps them identify and request precise services from the service catalog without the help staff intervening, saving them from unnecessary overhead and letting them focus on high-priority tickets.

A reliable IT Service Desk facilitates the implementation of best practices for the management of core IT processes namely - Service Request, Change Request, Incident Management and Problem Management to make the services agile. It brings about transparency and consistency among various departments to track business trends and patterns to make well thought out decisions for business profitability.

Vaishali Gopi