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.

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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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Ticket management in IT is the process of tracking, managing and resolving user requests and IT incidents. It is usually part of a company’s help desk and technical support system wherein internal employees, as well as external customers, in the case of Managed Service Providers (MSPs), can reach out to the company’s support team and submit requests for any IT issues they might be facing. Ticket management is typically carried out with the help of a help desk software solution.

Why Is Ticket Management Important?

The market for help desk software solutions is expected to reach USD 11 billion by 2023. An efficient ticket management system is imperative for streamlining, organizing and prioritizing your help desk requests as dictated by the criticality of the impacted IT service and level of difficulty of the query, instead of simply being dealt with in the order that they are received. As such, a well-designed ticket management system helps you maintain end-user and customer satisfaction. This is critical for MSPs to prevent customer churn.

How Does an IT Ticketing System Work? 

A basic ticket management system that implements manual ticketing follows a typical workflow: 

• The process begins with the help desk agent creating a ticket for a query or concern that was raised by a user.  
• The ticket is then assigned to a support rep. 
• The rep can work on the ticket and share the updates with the user. 
• 
The rep is notified of any responses from the user.
• Once the query is resolved, the ticket is closed. The ticket may be reopened in case the user has any follow-up requests or concerns. 

In the case of manual ticket resolution, an integration between the Service Desk and RMM solution allows technicians to easily remote into an endpoint from the ticket window to troubleshoot the issue. Workflow integration with the IT documentation solution also allows technicians to quickly pull up relevant asset information and resolve the issue faster. 

On the other hand, there are some ticket management solutions that provide automated ticket creation and remediation. For instance, Kaseya VSA (RMM) and Kaseya BMS/Vorex (PSA/Service Desk) allow tickets to be automatically created by Kaseya VSA in response to an alert on an endpoint or network device. Automated workflows in Kaseya BMS/Vorex allow tickets to be automatically resolved by executing Kaseya VSA agent procedures. 

Automation helps streamline your ticket management process, boost technician productivity, minimize manual errors, keep your end users and customers happy, and free up time for your technicians to focus on revenue-generating activities.

What Makes a Good Ticketing System? 

As discussed above, an efficient and reliable ticketing system allows organizations to streamline their service management/help desk operations. But what constitutes a good ticketing system? We’ve rounded up a list of key features to look for before investing in a ticket management system.

Automation — The solution should offer automated ticketing with streamlined workflows and advanced search/filtering functionalities. 

Organized Tracking — The solution should help you actively track:

• Ticket History: A record of previous tickets, issues and service history. 
• Communication Logs: A record of the interactions between the agents and customers. 
• KPIs and Performance Metrics: A record of response times, ticket resolution, customer satisfaction comments and so on. 

Prioritization – One of the most powerful features that a ticket management system should offer you is the ability to create priority queues that allow you to address the more important tickets (based on level of severity and complexity) instead of addressing them on a first-come-first-serve basis. 

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

Collaboration – The solution should provide a platform that enables different teams to work together more efficiently on resolving tickets on the basis of expertise, service record and so on.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) – In order to provide an element of accountability, the system should allow for the creation of clear goals and service standards that the agents can strive to achieve. 

Superior Customer Experience – In addition to well-defined SLAs, the solution should allow tickets to be addressed and resolved more quickly and with better accuracy, thus improving customer relations. Customer satisfaction correlates highly with speed of resolution of IT issues. Many companies track “First Contact Resolution rate.” 

Integrations With RMM and IT Documentation Tools – The solution should 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. Integration with the IT Documentation solution also enables technicians to have key asset information readily available at their fingertips, which helps them resolve tickets faster. 

What Are the Benefits of a Good Ticketing System? 

Let’s summarize some of the key benefits of a good ticketing system:

• Increases operational efficiency of the help desk team
• Better prioritization of tickets based on level of severity and complexity 
• Higher quality IT service delivery due to faster ticket resolution
• Lower overhead costs for help desk staffing 
• Refinement of support processes with data received from other systems such as RMM and IT documentation
• Better communication and collaboration between the technician and the requester 
• Maintaining customer service standards 
• Tracking of important service metrics and KPIs
   

Ticket Management Best Practices

Here’s a list of important best practices to follow for more streamlined and efficient ticket management: 

• Create a User-Friendly Experience – Select help desk tools that provide a user-friendly interface and easy-to-use ticketing system. 
• Establish a Clear Prioritization System – Establish a priority queue and system for grading that minimizes the potential for costly disruptions to the business. 
• Identify & Document Common Issues – Look for patterns and document common issues and fixes; make it easy to access these documents from the ticketing system. 
• Focus on Evaluating the True Cost of Your Service Offering – Metrics like Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR), tickets per asset and cost per ticket can help you evaluate the true cost of your service offering. Make sure that your ticketing system offers reporting of key metrics. 
• Encourage Self Service & Enablement – Create a knowledge base so that customers can find answers on their own when possible and remediate their own issues. 
• Focus on Customer Experience and Solicit Feedback – Above all, be sure to keep the customer and customer experience in mind. Focus on how you can make it easier for them and improve your processes. 

Superior Ticket Management With Kaseya BMS 

Kaseya BMS is a comprehensive professional services automation (PSA) solution that enables you to run your IT managed services business more efficiently at a fraction of your current costs. In addition to its Service Desk/Ticketing system, Kaseya BMS offers many other useful features such as: 

• Project management
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Billing and finance
• Business Intelligence and reporting

Want to know more about boosting IT efficiency and improving customer service? Request a demo of Kaseya BMS now! 

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