In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at the features and benefits of the Kaseya Help Desk service and discover how it can set your business on the path to higher profitability.

What is the Kaseya Help Desk service?

The Kaseya Help Desk is an outsourced, white-labeled IT support service designed to provide your clients and end users with high-quality technical support. By troubleshooting issues consistently, swiftly and efficiently, the service will ensure seamless operations and uninterrupted productivity for your business on a budget.

Our dedicated Help Desk staff will triage, manage and solve the large volume of L1 and L2 tickets, freeing your technicians to focus on solving complex IT issues that need their attention and expertise. The expert technicians manning the Kaseya Help Desk will amaze your clients with service that is second to none, boosting your credibility and profitability.

The biggest advantage of the Kaseya Help Desk is its 24/7 availability. Your clients or users can dial in at any time of the day or night and have someone address their issues. This function is available to everyone, regardless of the size of your business. If you’re an MSP, a help desk operating round the clock can give your business a significant advantage over competitors, helping you win deals, acquire more clients and scale your business without worrying about operational constraints.

What makes the Kaseya Help Desk different?

As an industry “one of a kind,” the Kaseya Help Desk is here to redefine efficient and high-quality IT support with innovative features.

Maintain compliance with government rules

Keeping compliance and security in mind, the Kaseya Help Desk team operates entirely from within the region. The U.S. office, situated in Orlando, Florida, comprises U.S. citizens, while EU citizens staff the Ireland office in Dundalk. Whether it’s CMMC 2.0 or GDPR, the Kaseya Help Desk will meet all your compliance requirements.

White-labeled for your business’ success

The Kaseya Help Desk is yours by definition. Our technicians will answer the phone and respond to emails as if they were part of your team. They will use your runbooks from IT Glue and remediate tickets that show up in your PSA/ticketing solution, ensuring a seamless resolution process consistent with your policies and protocols.

Skilled staff provides top-notch service quality

The skilled technicians operating the Kaseya Help Desk service are experts at navigating a number of industry-leading solutions, such as VSA, Datto RMM, Vorex, BMS, Autotask and IT Glue. With a three-minute call pickup (SLOs), the Kaseya Help Desk guarantees swift response times, ensuring efficient issue resolution for exceptional end-user experience.

Cost saver and efficiency driver

With the current economic climate getting grimmer by the day, reducing costs and saving money is everyone’s priority. The Kaseya Help Desk service provides unlimited tickets per device model for complete support that unlocks business growth. By leveraging economies of scale, the Kaseya Help Desk ensures that our services cost you less than hiring a technician would. So, while your competitors cut back, you can scale your business and get a leg up without burning through your budget.

Benefits of the Kaseya Help Desk service

These are the top benefits of the Kaseya Help Desk service for your business:

Provide the highest level of service quality

Having technicians repeatedly perform mundane tasks can lead to exhaustion and decreased morale, ultimately affecting service quality. By redirecting their focus and expertise toward more challenging and impactful tasks, you can boost their productivity and morale and foster a sense of accomplishment within the team. As your technicians return to doing things they love, our team will be hard at work crushing tickets with remarkable efficiency and speed.

Accelerate your growth

Incredibly, 81% of organizations are experiencing a shortage of skilled tech workers. A lack of skilled technicians can force you to delay your growth plans and even rethink your long-term business goals. Even if you find the right candidate, you might miss the growth opportunity since onboarding technicians and getting them up to speed can take time. The Kaseya Help Desk has some of the best technicians, equipped with the knowhow to provide outstanding support so you can confidently scale.

Increase profitability

Outsourcing to the Kaseya Help Desk will instantly expand your margin since it is more cost-effective than hiring full-time technicians. This will immediately reduce your overhead expenses associated with maintaining an in-house staff while also giving you access to a diverse pool of technicians.

Decoupling sales success from operational woes for MSPs

Although many MSPs have a powerful and effective sales process, growing the support team becomes unaffordable. With Kaseya Help Desk, your operational efficiency and potential are virtually unlimited, enabling you to onboard clients and users without overloading your operations team. This seamless scalability ensures that your service quality remains uncompromised even during periods of rapid growth or increased demand.

Better work-life balance

Despite constant efforts to improve the work-life balance of IT professionals, increasing workloads and limited resources do little to solve the problem. A staggering 70% of MSP executives and 62% of IT technicians at small and midsized businesses (SMBs) reported working on a holiday or weekend.

IT professionals are being asked to do more with fewer resources every day, leading to acute burnout and stress. By significantly reducing the strain on their schedules, one of the outcomes of the Kaseya Help Desk service is to help IT professionals enjoy a healthier work-life balance. Eliminating burnout and stress leads to a decrease in technician churn, creating a more stable and satisfied workforce.

Elevate your IT support experience with Kaseya

The Kaseya Help Desk is a best-in-class IT support service designed with a focus on empowering MSPs and small to midsize businesses (SMBs) to exceed their highest growth targets. Partnering with Kaseya to manage your IT service delivery will help you streamline your help desk process, giving you opportunities to scale and grow.

Outsourcing your mundane tickets to our help desk will not only strengthen your process but also make it more cost-effective. Moreover, you can uncover more gains by channeling the skill and time of your technicians towards long-pending, high-priority IT projects. Gear up to see a dramatic improvement in your budget and technician workload. To find out more, click here.

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Whether you are an MSP providing a host of IT services to clients or a small and midsize business (SMB) with big ambitions, having a smart and reliable help desk plays a significant role in ensuring business continuity. It’s a service that your clients and users turn to when flustered by something as simple as a forgotten password or as critical as server issues before an important project delivery.

Through quality technical support and speedy resolution to problems, help desks play a pivotal role in helping businesses maintain uptime, provide seamless service delivery and win the trust of their clients and users. Whether you are looking to start a help desk from scratch or improve an existing one, our blog offers great pointers while also serving as a refresher. Give it a go, you’ll be wiser for it.

What is a help desk?

An IT help desk is a platform or tool that enables businesses to organize customer communication and respond to IT-related queries quickly and effectively. The IT help desk tool helps your IT team track and resolve IT issues generated from different channels from a single console. The tool saves time and promotes faster and more effective resolution of issues, thus enhancing the overall user experience and driving business growth.

What is the difference between a help desk and a service desk?

Although often used interchangeably, help desk and service desk are different from one another. Let’s take a look at what differentiates the two.

Help desk

A help desk provides technical support to end users, troubleshoots customer and user issues, and/or guides them through specific tasks and actions. Help desks can be incorporated with larger service desks or exist as a separate operation. The definitive goal of a help desk is to provide resolutions for user requests as efficiently as possible. Help desks are designed to be reactive in nature and are often considered a subset of the service desk.

Service desk

An IT service desk encompasses a broader set of functions as compared to a help desk. It is essentially a single point of contact between the service provider and the end users. As opposed to a help desk that is focused on problem resolution, a service desk is designed to take care of the overall business needs.

In addition to managing service requests and resolving incidents, a typical service desk also facilitates user communication. It focuses on improving the efficiency and performance of IT technicians, meeting service level agreements (SLAs) and shaping the way IT professionals deliver their services to both internal employees and customers.

What is the function of a help desk?

Most organizations deploy help desk management software to create, manage, process and resolve tickets. Here’s how a typical help desk management software resolves customer queries:

1. A user registers an issue by raising a ticket in the help desk management software.
2. The help desk team is then notified of the ticket via email, push notifications or SMS.
3. Next, based on the rules set by the team, the ticket is either automatically assigned to a technician or manually picked by one based on the skill set and availability.
4. Next is the ticket processing stage, where the technician assigned to the ticket will try to fix the issue. The technician may:
   • Interact with the user by posting replies and updates to the ticket
   • Attach files to the query for more information
   • Escalate the ticket to another team
5. Once the issue is fixed, the technician notifies the end user of the same and marks the ticket as resolved or closed.
6. Depending on the type of the ticket, the issue and its resolution may be posted to the knowledge base to help other technicians troubleshoot the same issues in the future.

Why is a help desk important?

An efficient IT help desk is a quintessential part of any successful organization. The fundamental aim of an IT help desk is to provide swift and effective resolutions for user queries. It is a critical business resource that helps in reducing downtime associated with customer support services, increasing efficiency and enhancing customer satisfaction.

The help desk software prioritizes issues based on category, nature, level of criticality and more, enabling the technicians to multitask. Ticket management, which is the core function of a help desk platform, helps sort customer interactions based on demographics, date and urgency. By automating ticket management, you can easily speed up the process of case resolution.

Having a full-service help desk is critical for businesses to be more holistic in terms of services offered. While a service desk is more strategic in nature, a help desk is more tactical. As such, you need to get the tactical aspect right to build a strong foundation for your business.

What are the benefits of a help desk?

Now that you understand that a help desk is a vital part of any business, let’s discuss some of its benefits:

• Streamlined operations: A help desk solution acts as a one-stop shop to manage all your customer queries, complaints, needs, requests and support. It is essentially a single point of communication between you and your end users and helps resolve any IT issues swiftly and effectively.
• Increased customer satisfaction: Customer experience is at the crux of any business operation. To that end, an IT help desk facilitates a seamless experience for your customers when they interact with your business by providing them a uniform business response and predictable business response times as committed in the SLA. In addition to this, most help desk management solutions today provide similar experiences across various platforms, including smartphones, tablets, desktops and the like.
• Knowledge repository: A library or knowledge base that stores comprehensive information on IT issues and ways to troubleshoot them is an invaluable resource for businesses. An IT help desk management software helps curate this knowledge repository, helping IT teams resolve similar issues quickly in the future. Additionally, your end users can directly troubleshoot their common IT issues with help from the knowledge base. This will lead to lower ticket volumes in the long run.
• Improved ROI: Although deploying a help desk solution involves additional investment, these costs are offset by the high return on investment through higher team efficiency, greater productivity, enhanced product quality and greater customer satisfaction. An IT help desk also helps get real-time feedback on service and product issues, thus eliminating the costs associated with conducting post-release surveys.
• Strong reputation and brand image: As mentioned earlier, an IT help desk provides a seamless customer experience that leads to greater customer satisfaction. Happy customers are loyal to your business and more inclined to recommend your brand to others. As such, deploying an IT help desk can be very helpful in establishing a strong brand image and building a good reputation in the market.

What are some goals and objectives for a successful help desk?

Now that you understand how beneficial a help desk can be for your business, let’s discuss some common KPIs that you must track in order to evaluate how effective your customer support efforts are.

• Average resolution time: The average resolution time is an effective measure of how long it takes to resolve a user query. Evaluating the average resolution time helps you analyze whether you are providing your customers with the level of service promised and identify any potential opportunities to ensure faster and more effective service delivery.
• First response time: The first response time is the average amount of time a technician takes to provide an initial first response to a support ticket or query raised by a customer. It is important to minimize your first response time as much as you can to ensure customer delight.
• First contact resolution rate (FCRR): The FCRR is the percentage of help desk queries that are resolved during the first interaction with the customer. As such, the greater the FCRR, the better the customer experience. As such, it is imperative to continually track and improve your FCRR in order to enhance customer satisfaction and build a stronger brand image.
• Cost per ticket: Another important help desk metric, cost per ticket is a measure of the average costs involved in resolving a request. Tracking this metric will allow you to evaluate the efficiency of your help desk technicians and the resources you most commonly use to fix issues.
• SLA compliance rate: The SLA compliance rate is the percentage of IT incidents that are resolved within the agreed-upon SLA parameters. This metric is an effective measure of how compliant you are with your SLAs and when you must make an effort in order to improve it.
• Customer satisfaction: One of the most important help desk KPIs you must track, customer satisfaction can be measured by providing your customers with a way to rate your services and provide feedback on their overall help desk experience. Tracking this metric will help you ensure that you are delivering help desk services to the best of your capabilities.

What are help desk best practices?

Implementing an effective and efficient help desk is a major challenge that most growing businesses face today. Here’s a list of best practices that you must keep in mind to ensure your team makes the most of your help desk to minimize business disruptions, drive efficiency and enhance customer experience.

• Deploy a robust help desk solution: One of the major prerequisites of building a strong help desk is deploying the right help desk management solution that works for you. The right help desk solution will not only enable you to seamlessly handle large ticket volumes but also help control your overall IT costs.
• Automate common processes: A robust help desk software will allow you to automate common, low-value help desk workflows and processes and free up time for your technicians so they can focus on more critical issues at hand. For instance, by automating ticket distribution, you can ensure that any incoming tickets are automatically routed to the relevant technicians. This leads to faster ticket resolution and greater customer satisfaction.
• Establish your SLAs: Setting your SLAs is imperative to establishing standards for your help desk team and helping your technicians prioritize their work. These SLAs help set timeline expectations for customers and ensure that your support team is consistent with the support offered.
• Measure help desk KPIs and metrics: As mentioned earlier, measuring your help desk metrics and KPIs helps you analyze whether you are providing the best possible help desk support to your users or not. It also helps in identifying key areas for improvement to ensure the most effective and efficient help desk support for your users and enhance overall customer experience.

Help desk services with Kaseya

We understand that building a help desk is easier said than done, especially when skilled technicians are hard to find. Moreover, the constant influx of mundane tickets is an energy drainer, one of the main causes of technician churn.

In today’s environment, outsourcing your IT support services is a smart approach. Outsourcing your daily IT tickets to Kaseya Help Desk Services is a surefire way to provide quality IT services to your end users, accelerate growth and increase profits. Whether trouble comes in the form of economic headwinds, IT staff churn or increasing workload, we will ease the burden on your team by tackling all your L1 and L2 tickets. Our white-labeled service provides 24/7 ticket management, and our industry-leading service level objectives (SLOs) will guarantee satisfaction for all your clients and users.

We deliver a best-in-class user experience at a price that will knock your socks off. We look forward to working with you on your growth journey. Learn more about our services and join the waitlist today.

The post What Is a Help Desk? Understanding Its Function, Benefits, Goals and Best Practices appeared first on Kaseya.

By Daniel Garcia, CCO of Pia
Guest Author 

In today’s current technological climate, managed services providers (MSPs) are in demand more than ever. With more businesses looking to outsource their IT, there are endless opportunities to seize. That said, it’s important to recognize that the need to scale operations is equally key to business growth. 

As an MSP, you know that your technicians play a crucial role in your business. They’re the backbone of your service desks and often are the first people in the office and last out. Having an entire service desk operation, complete with technicians, enables you to deliver on the promises you make to your customers. However, all too often, the technicians get stuck doing mundane and repetitive, time-consuming tasks. Password resets, new user creations and user terminations are just a few examples. Doing the same repetitive tasks can often lead to employees becoming dissatisfied with their roles and looking for the nearest exit. 

What if there was a solution to this? What if there was a tool you could implement that would free up your tech’s time, enabling them to focus more attention on more complex areas of their roles? Sounds too good to be true, right? 

Automation Is Key to Success 

Implementing an automation solution will help your company improve its service desk. By definition, automation is the process in which technology is used to complete daily tasks with minimal human interaction. So, rather than your techs working their way through an endless stream of tickets, you can use the automation tool to quickly and efficiently sieve through the noise. The result? A better night’s sleep for your techs and improved operational efficiency across the board, which will result in higher customer satisfaction rates as tickets are being resolved promptly. 

Automating tickets will enable you to improve your operational efficiency. According to Logic Monitors’ recent research report, “The Next-Gen Managed Service Provider” (registration required), 95% of the 600 businesses surveyed say automating their processes is necessary to gain the time to focus on innovation and strategic goals. This suggests that if you automate the most time-consuming and repetitive tickets, your techs will have more time to focus on growing their skill set, building relationships with customers and working on areas that will help you grow your business and become more profitable. 

Let’s take the number of errors you usually see across your service desk. As humans, we all make mistakes and get a little burnt out sometimes. However, an automation solution will help reduce the number of errors. This is because when a ticket is logged in, specific instructions for that ticket and those like it will be triggered and performed the same way each time, leaving little to no room for error. 

In the same way that you will see a reduction in errors, you will also see an increase in productivity. Again, this is because each ticket has a set of specific instructions, which are automatically performed the same way each time, even if your techs are out of the office. This speeds up the resolution process and gives your techs more time to focus on other key aspects of their roles that will contribute to business growth and improved customer satisfaction. 

Which Type of Automation Is Right for My Company? 

As with any solution, the options available are endless, but finding the right one for your business can be challenging. Do your research before you dive headfirst into purchasing and implementing an automation solution. Spend some time hopping on a few demos and seeing how the solutions work and integrate. You should also consider if the solution can help mitigate your pain points. Can it help to save you time, money, and resources? Will it deliver faster ticket resolution times? And most importantly, does the vendor align with you and your business needs? 

Automating ticket resolution is a game-changer for MSPs. However, going through the buying and implementation process can be challenging as you need to fine-tune what works for you and your business. What can be said for automation is that in doing it, you will be allowing yourself to provide your customers with a lot more, which will ultimately contribute to ensuring your MSP remains profitable and grows in the right direction. 

This is a sponsored blog post.

The post The Future of MSPs: Automated Ticket Resolution appeared first on Kaseya.

A help desk comprises of a group of skilled technicians using help desk software to troubleshoot IT problems. It allows technicians to track tickets from multiple channels quickly and efficiently and maintain business continuity and high productivity. According to Future Market Insight, the global help desk software market was valued at around $9.9 billion in 2021 and is estimated to reach to reach a valuation of nearly $26.8 billion by the end of 2032.

An IT help desks prevent users from wasting productive time searching for simple solutions that an expert can provide in a minute.

What are help desk metrics?

A poorly managed help desk will not only disrupt business but also become a costly affair. Did you know that 89% of consumers will switch to a competitor following a poor experience? IT technicians use several metrics to track help desk performance and ensure that it remains productive, efficient and operates at its best capacity. IT technicians and executives can use these metrics to identify help desk features performing well and those that need improvement.

The metrics also provide insights into whether a help desk is on track to meet its key performance indicators (KPIs). Metrics drive KPIs. To illustrate this with an example, let’s look at the ticket resolution rate and average response time. With these metrics, the help desk can see if its KPI to increase customer satisfaction is being met.

In this blog, we’ll look at all the crucial help desk metrics, understand their importance and explain how to leverage them to boost business growth.

10 help desk metrics to measure

A help desk is the backbone of any organization. However, those selling technology solutions need a top-notch one. The success and growth of their business will eventually depend on how quickly and seamlessly their help desk resolves customer queries. The efficiency with which a help desk operates directly impacts user experience and can determine employee and client retention.

As with any business department, help desks must meet performance requirements. They have to ensure that users who raise a ticket or an IT query get the resolution in the fastest time. By tracking help desk metrics, technicians can ensure their engagement with users meets expectations.

Companies can analyze several metrics to determine performance. In this section, we’ll look at the top 10 metrics that all help desks should track to assess the efficiency and quality of their service and improve their customer service experience.

1. Ticket volume: Ticket volume refers to the number of incoming service requests or support tickets generated by the user. Tracking this metric will give you insights into how many tickets your team can resolve in a day, week, month and year. It will ensure that you maximize output without overworking the team.
2. Tickets by channel: Help desks can receive requests from multiple channels such as emails, web forms, live chat, social media, phone, etc. Technicians can train staff in the popular channels and determine where to station the most staff and what type of training to provide. These steps will lead to an efficient help desk.
3. First response time (FRT): It’s the time an agent takes to respond to a ticket as soon as it is submitted. FRT can be calculated in minutes, hours and even days. A quick first response rate positively impact customer loyalty and satisfaction. About 90% of customers rate an “immediate” response as important or very important when they have a customer service question. The goal of an efficient help desk is to reduce the FRT rate, which goes on to improve the customer experience.The formula for calculating average FTR is:
   FRT = Total FRTs during that particular minute or hour / total number of resolved tickets
4. Average response time: This is the average time an agent takes to respond to a query within a defined timeframe. The FRT metric calculates how long it takes an agent to respond to a ticket, whereas average response time calculates how long it takes each agent to respond to a ticket within a specific timeframe. This metric can be used to identify peak productivity hours.The formula to calculate this metric is:
   Average response time = Total time taken to respond during the selected time period / the number of responses in the selected time period.
5. Ticket resolution rate: An IT help desk agent’s performance and quality of work can be determined using this metric. It compares the number of tickets an agent solves within a timeframe with the number of tickets assigned to them. A high ticket resolution rate reflects well on the customer service team. It means that the team is resolving tickets promptly and is on track to meet KPIs.Ticket resolution rate = No. of number of tickets solved by an agent / the number of tickets assigned x 100
6. First contact resolution rate (FCRR): The FCRR is the percentage of help desk queries resolved during the first interaction with the customer. As such, the greater the FCRR, the better the customer experience. Therefore, it is imperative to continually track and improve your FCRR to enhance customer satisfaction and build a stronger brand image.
7. Average resolution time: The average resolution time is an effective measure of how long it takes to resolve a user query. According to a report by CMO Council, a fast response time is the most important element of the digital customer experience. Evaluating the average resolution time helps you analyze whether you are providing your customers with the level of service promised and helps identify any potential opportunities to ensure faster and most effective service delivery.
8. Agent utilization: Agent utilization is the ratio of work produced by IT help desk technicians against their work capacity. An agent who puts in six hours of work in an eight-hour shift is working at a utilization capacity of 6/8 X 100 = 75%. Agent utilization is the best way to measure labor productivity. Keeping a tab on this data can help lower help desk costs while increasing output.
9. Agent performance: Agent performance measures how each help desk agent is performing on each of the help desk metrics. Through this, we can identify agents who perform well and those who do poorly. This data can be used to identify best practices and design training material for new or underperforming agents.
10. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): Customer satisfaction scores are the simplest way to determine how happy or unhappy a customer is with your service. At the end of an interaction, customers are often asked to rate their satisfaction on a scale. It could be a 1 – 3 or 1 – 10 scale. To determine the score, all the positive responses are divided by the total number of responses collected and divided by 100%. Based on this percentage, you can determine whether customer satisfaction is at an all-time high level or if there is room for improvement. According to Hubspot’s Annual State of Service Report 2022, CSAT remains the most important KPI for almost 75% of customer service leaders.

Why are help desk metrics important?

The IT help desk plays a key role in managing an enterprise’s IT systems and infrastructure. It is the primary touchpoint for every IT issue, problem and request. Measuring and benchmarking key IT help desk metrics is essential for CIOs and IT operations leaders looking to improve business alignment and value, end-user productivity and reduce the total cost of IT support.

Now that you understand that a help desk is a vital part of any business, let’s discuss some of its benefits.

Capacity planning

Amazon is an undisputed leader in its field due to its excellent customer service. To achieve sustained growth and build brand loyalty, companies must provide top-notch customer service consistently. By tracking help desk metrics, business leaders can take the correct call regarding whether they have the resources to scale their business up or not. In a nutshell, capacity planning and customer service go hand in hand since an overburdened help desk will result in more errors and a lower customer retention rate.

Resource optimization

Help desk optimization lowers costs, increases productivity and improves output quality, which leads to higher customer satisfaction. Metrics such as agent performance and agent utilization will help you decide whether to hire more help desk agents or whether to maximize the utilization of your current staff.

Increase transparency

Measuring metrics allows for accurate estimation of a help desk’s performance. It fosters accountability and keeps stakeholders updated on how things are going. When clear systems and processes are in place, problems get resolved quickly, and the people responsible for solving them understand what needs to be done.

Uncover challenges

By looking for patterns and trends in the metrics data, technicians can spot common issues and take steps to fix them. Regularly performing this step helps ensure that the process runs smoothly and that problems are caught early on.

Identify opportunities

Metrics guide help desk managers to change and update their strategy as and when needed. By guiding technicians to prioritize critical tasks over noncritical tasks, it keeps the help desk on track to meet SLA requirements.

How can I improve my help desk efficiency?

Implementing an effective and efficient help desk is a major challenge that most growing businesses face today. Here’s a list of best practices that you must keep in mind to ensure your team makes the most of your help desk to minimize business disruptions, drive efficiency and enhance customer experience.

Create a knowledge base and self-service portal

A library or knowledge base that stores comprehensive information on IT issues and ways to troubleshoot them is an invaluable resource for businesses. An IT help desk management software helps curate this knowledge repository, thus helping IT teams resolve similar issues quicker in the future. Additionally, your end users can directly troubleshoot their common IT issues with help from the knowledge base. This will lead to lower ticket volumes in the long run.

Establish consistent reporting

The solution should feature a dashboard that offers real-time information on the progress and status of tickets, allow you to easily generate custom reports and help you gain insights to make the right business decisions quickly and confidently.

Solicit customer feedback

Although deploying a help desk solution involves additional investment, these costs are offset by the high return on investment through higher team efficiency, greater productivity, enhanced product quality and greater customer satisfaction. An IT help desk also helps get real-time feedback on service and product issues, thus eliminating the costs associated with conducting post-release surveys.

Integrate and automate

A robust help desk software will allow you to automate common, low-value help desk workflows and processes and free up time for your technicians so they can focus on more critical issues at hand. It should also provide seamless integration with RMM and IT documentation tools and enable technicians to easily remote into an endpoint from the ticket window to troubleshoot the issue. According to Kaseya’s 2022 MSP Global Benchmark Survey, a whopping 96% of MSP respondents said they believe integrating core applications like RMM, PSA and IT documentation is important to their business.

Improve your help desk performance with Kaseya

Kaseya BMS is a professional services automation (PSA) tool that provides help desk capabilities designed to help you spend less time tracking tickets and more time serving your customers. It will allow you to crush IT tickets in record time by enabling you to upgrade your helpdesk functionality.

It enables you to better track tickets until customer issues are resolved and capture more billable revenue through improved billing per contract. The outcome: improved customer service and greater profitability. BMS works seamlessly with Kaseya VSA, our endpoint management and network monitoring solution, and IT Glue for knowledge and configuration management.

Run your help desk and IT operations confidently and efficiently with BMS. Request a free demo today!

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A service request may be defined as a formal request that a client or an employee of the client makes, asking a service provider to provide them with something that would be useful in the business’s day-to-day operations. In other words, a service request is typically raised to procure something you didn’t have to begin with.

An Example of a Service Request

There are numerous kinds of service requests a user can raise. These could include simple requests for advice, approval or information. A user might also raise service requests to access printers, reimburse expenses, reset passwords or upgrade to a newer version of software.

Usually, service requests have a high probability of involving standard or pre-approved changes. For instance, a company may have a policy to provide employees with extra storage space when they run out.

In this case, an employee may raise a service request for extra memory, which is a standard, pre-approved change that does not require a long process of perusal and approval.

What Is Service Request Management?

Effective management of service requests is imperative for maintaining team efficiency and ensuring business success. Service request management involves the processes and tools that provide all the departments within an organization (e.g., compliance, IT, marketing, finance and human resources) with a self-service platform to accept, keep track of, respond to and close a variety of service requests from customers, employees and external vendors.

Service request management streamlines the aforementioned processes, especially when it is configured to behave in a manner that aligns with organizational needs. Service request management enables users to submit service requests, assign responsibility for requests and track their status from the time they are submitted to the time they are closed.

What Are the Main Steps in Service Request Management?

Let’s look at the various steps involved in the service request management process:

•  A user submits a service request from your service management portal.
• The service request is assigned to a service desk agent from the IT service team.
• The agent assesses the request based on the standard qualification and approval processes. If required, they might forward the service request for business or financial approval.
• The service desk agent either processes the request or sends it across to the relevant team.
• Once the service request is resolved, the agent closes the ticket and follows up with the customer to ensure that they are satisfied with the resolution.

What Is the Difference Between Service Request Management and Incident Management?

Often confused with each other, incident management and service request management are starkly different concepts. While a service request is a user request to procure access to something they need for their day-to-day operations, an incident can be defined as an unplanned or unanticipated error or disruption in IT service delivery or a considerable reduction in the quality of IT service. Examples of incidents include a server outage, laptop not starting or broken printer.

As mentioned previously, service request management consists of the processes and tools required to manage service requests from internal and external users. However, incident management is targeted towards restoring services after an interruption, with minimum downtime. Incident management ensures that there is minimum loss of business efficiency and productivity and quality of service delivery is maintained.

What Is the Purpose of Service Request Management?

The global market for service request management solutions is anticipated to rise at a considerable rate during the forecast period 2021 to 2027. Some key reasons why effective service request management is business-critical include:

• Maintaining business productivity and efficiency at all times
• Ensuring minimum downtime and business interruption
• Alleviating day-to-day workload on IT teams
• Reducing impacts or risks of having malfunctioning or inadequate services and processes
• Improving service delivery and ensuring customer satisfaction

Service Request Management Best Practices

Service request management makes it easy to ask for help with simple self-service, provide answers with knowledge base suggestions and streamline request fulfillment to deliver optimum service. In light of that, there are a few things that IT service teams should be prioritizing.

Service request management helps streamline request processing for delivering optimum service and minimizing downtime. As such, we’ve put together some best practices that will help improve your service request management and make it more efficient. Read on.

• Automating self-service can significantly reduce the workload on your IT team and free up time for your service desk agents to focus on more strategic tasks. For instance, automating follow-up communication with users can help save time that your agents spend in responding to customers, keep customers updated with estimated resolution time and improve customer experience.
• Make sure to automate and standardize the approval process where possible. For example, any service request for a new monitor will be pre-approved and also automatically processed. This will save time on repetitive tasks and unnecessary additional formalities.
• To make self-service more efficient, you must integrate knowledge, provide customers with easy access to the knowledge base and redirect service tickets to easily searchable knowledge base articles. This will help make the self-service experience easier and more fulfilling for your customers.
• Focus on your most popular service request and build from there based on feedback and usage. Create a self-service catalog based on what your users are looking for to provide them with an efficient customer service experience.

Support Service Request Management With Kaseya

Kaseya BMS provides the software you need to run your business more efficiently at a fraction of the cost. With Kaseya BMS, you can easily create, manage and resolve all your service requests and tickets and keep your customers happy.

Seamless integration across Kaseya BMS, Kaseya VSA and IT Glue enables you to optimize your daily IT operations with 30% fewer tickets that are resolved 40% faster, saving you time and money in a way no other solution can.

Want to know more about Kaseya BMS? Contact us now!

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