IT Help Desk Efficiency and Scale
Improving Customer Experience
The modern workforce is more empowered and enabled than ever before because of cloud and wireless technologies. They expect to work from anywhere without compromising productivity, personalization, convenience, or speed, necessitating careful consideration of how a company manages the end-to-end delivery of IT services to customers.
Most organizations today strive to have the following primary IT support framework to service their workforce.
- IT Service Management (ITSM) includes all the end-to-end activities involved in designing, creating, delivering, supporting, and managing the lifecycle of IT services.
- IT Service Desk provides a centralized contact between the IT service provider and the users. A service desk usually encompasses all activities that include service request management, incident management, knowledge management, self-service, and reporting.
- IT Help Desk effectively performs several functions to assist customers. It provides a single point of contact for users to gain assistance in incident management and solve known problems. A modern IT helpdesk creates and manages departmental knowledge, offering self-service for customers who want to resolve incidents quickly and independently. It also provides metrics on the team and the tool’s effectiveness.
Client Challenge: An Underperforming IT Help Desk
Our client was leveraging another technical services firm to provide IT help desk support. However, the IT help desk was not meeting customer expectations nor scaling to meet demands. Our client asked us to scope support for:
- Windows 10
- Network Support
- Application Support
- Onboarding
- Phones
- Additional types of support cases
IT Help Desk Challenges
Maintaining a Positive Customer Experience Amidst Rapid Growth
With technology changing rapidly, the demand for IT help desk services increases faster than staffing and budgets can keep up with, which stifles the user experience. IT help desks are urged to do more with less while becoming increasingly accountable for the results. They are required to make better use of available technology and become more process-driven and efficient, all while continuing to prioritize the customer experience.
Other Common Challenges
Each IT help desk is unique concerning the industry knowledge, scope, objectives, or customer requirements. Some common challenges include:
- Staff Turnover: Organizations spend too much time and money hiring and training staff for help desks.
- Best Practices and Tools: Organizations do not have critical tools, processes, and practices to allow users to perform self-service support issues.
- Rapidly Changing Technology: An organization’s IT service desk must stay in the loop and keep pace with the latest technology developments. The staff needs to acquire new skills and access relevant knowledge regularly.
- Scalability: Without a tool for collecting, recording, and analyzing support data, companies can easily fall into the trap of solving the same issues all over again. In other words, if the IT help desk does not document common problems, they’ll waste time identifying and fixing issues they’ve already resolved.
Project Engagement
Organizations must balance providing a great customer experience with scaling an IT help desk with rapidly changing technologies.
Our client looked for a partner that recognized these unique challenges and offered various potential solutions in an unbiased approach to achieve its goals quickly and smoothly. We worked with the client to ensure they understood our service delivery options:
- Project-Based Resources: Provide technical resources on a contingent basis to support project needs.
- Talent Management Solutions: Allow our clients to stay focused on project deliverables while managing the resources and the resource plan for the project.
- Hybrid Managed Solutions: Allow our clients to manage the broader program while we manage components or projects as part of the overall program.
- Outsourced Managed Solutions: Allow our clients to outsource the entire project to us, including project management, resource planning, and resource management.
- Professional Services: We deliver a specific, high-quality project outcome to the client on time and within budget.
Our experts spent time with the client’s team to understand their needs and craft a comprehensive solution. We recognized the need to carefully manage the help desk changes with an adaptive but proven process to scale to meet the overall project schedule.
TSG Managed Solution
The Select Group Managed Solutions Team took responsibility for the client’s IT help desk performance. Our planning process identified the different capabilities required to create a help desk team to discover and validate service accounts with high-level skills:
- Project Coordinators
- IT Project Managers
- Windows Deployment Technicians
- Data Analysts
- Help Desk Specialists
- Telecom Technicians
- Application Developers
Our rapid fulfillment of an entire team and deliverables-based approach allowed us to stay engaged at scale with a client. Our process begins with appointing a long-term engagement manager to be the single point of contact for our client, ensuring service-level agreements (SLAs), deliverables, and milestones are met. The engagement manager also identifies and manages the project’s scope as dictated in the SOW, including all financial performances like invoicing and budget tracking, service level agreements, in addition to team performance issues.
IT Help Desk Results
The client’s decision to partner with The Select Group delivered the IT help desk transition on time. It allowed them to meet their overall internal business objectives to improve their workforce support experience, as well as increase general productivity. TSG’s on-time project delivery and excellent performance secured 10/10 NPS satisfaction scores from the client.
Benefits to the client included:
- 300% increase in team efficiency as measured by daily case workload.
- Improved customer satisfaction metrics.
- Implementation of a document knowledge base to capture common requests and solutions.
- Deduced time spent hiring and providing personnel oversight.
- Raised team experience levels through contract renewals and promotions.
- Improved business agility and enabled competitive services to respond to demand quickly.