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In a recent article by McKinsey, nine crucial elements for achieving an optimal employee experience were highlighted. One of these elements asks the question, "Does my company’s technology enable me to work efficiently and without friction?" This is where a company's IT support team steps in, playing a vital role in ensuring that workplace technology functions seamlessly and without hassle.
Have you ever wondered what happens behind the scenes of an IT help desk? If not, you'd find a common sight: overworked employees overwhelmed by a mountain of pending tasks. The quest for a truly seamless IT help desk remains a challenge for many companies, despite its growing importance for both employees and IT service teams.
With this in mind, we've prepared this guide to demystify the inner workings of an internal IT help desk. We'll also explore how conversational IT help desks provide more effective solutions for streamlining your IT support processes.
What is an internal IT help desk?
An internal IT help desk is a centralized hub within an organization that provides technical support and assistance to employees or internal users. It is the go-to place for resolving IT issues, answering tech-related questions, and assisting with software and hardware problems.
The primary goal of an internal IT help desk is to provide timely and practical support to the employees. It ensures that employees can continue their work with minimal disruptions.
The internal IT help desk streamlines information flow, ensuring employees can access the necessary resources. It helps organizations increase productivity, improve employee satisfaction, and enhance overall operational efficiency within the organization.
Why do you need an internal IT help desk?
Short answer - “to keep both employees and IT support teams satisfied”. Nevertheless, in most cases, we observe that neither of these stakeholders is happy.
It is a vicious cycle where employees feel they are not getting enough support from the IT help desks, while the IT support teams feel that the employees are not trying enough to reduce their dependencies on the support team.
Ideally, any organization requires an internal IT help desk to:
1. Streamline communication and issue resolution
An internal IT help desk is an open-to-all platform where employees can report problems, seek guidance, or request assistance. This eliminates the need for scattered communication through emails or phone calls, ensuring that all requests are promptly documented and addressed.
With an internal ticketing system, the help desk can efficiently manage and track the progress of each request. This enables support teams to prioritize and address issues based on urgency, ensuring critical problems are resolved quickly.
2. Improve productivity and efficiency
An internal IT help desk offers self-service options that empower employees to find solutions independently, reducing dependency on specialized teams. Implementing an internal help desk ticketing system enables efficient tracking and management of requests.
3. Empower employees with self-service
An internal help desk has the potential to empower employees through self-service capabilities. Employees can access frequently asked questions, guides, tutorials, and other resources by offering a knowledge base or a self-help portal. This empowers employees to resolve common issues on their own and save time.
Self-service reduces the workload for the help desk team and enables employees to stay informed and take ownership of their own tasks. The internal IT help desk promotes employee autonomy, boosts confidence, and enhances organizational efficiency by enabling self-service.
5. Enable data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement
An internal IT help desk can provide valuable insights through data analysis. By tracking support requests, response times, and customer feedback, organizations can identify trends, recurring issues, and areas for improvement. This data-driven approach enables teams to make informed decisions, optimize workflows, and deliver better support services.
By analyzing employee feedback, the internal help desk can gain insights into employee satisfaction and take proactive measures to enhance the support experience. This continuous feedback loop ensures that the help desk remains responsive to employee needs and can deliver high-quality service.
Best practices to manage an internal IT help desk
Now that we looked at the benefits of an internal IT help desk, here are the best practices to make the best use of those help desks and achieve optimal level of productivity:
1. Use automation
Large enterprises receive many support requests daily. It is difficult to list, assign, and resolve the submissions manually. Hence, support teams should consider using automation.
With automated ticketing systems like Zendesk, you can develop customized workflows for your employees and use third-party integrations to create comprehensive knowledge bases and product tours. This way, you can notify employees about the progress of their requests in the same platform and set appropriate SLAs for each request.
You can also consider using chatbots or conversational ITSM solutions like Atomicwork. These tools empower the employees by responding to their queries and providing specific answers to their questions without involving the support team members each time. These platforms route only complex queries to the support agents.
2. Develop a prioritization process
IT teams can't process all queries at once. There should be a dedicated prioritization framework to identify the priority items. These could be based on the due date, urgency, source of request, etc.
For example, any request from the product or customer success team will be given supreme priority because these teams are directly responsible for assisting the customers.
The priority criteria should be established for the larger team so that they can get an understanding of when they can expect the requests to be processed. This will reduce the noise within your support team and increase the employees' productivity levels.
3. Gather feedback and train your team
Develop a solid feedback process for your organization. IT support team leaders can conduct monthly or quarterly surveys across the organization to understand if the internal IT help desk is effective and what challenges it should address. Based on the results of these surveys, you can train your team members and implement new processes.
What are the most common internal IT help desk channels and the associated challenges?
It is a consistent struggle for IT support leaders to pick an efficient help desk channel without affecting the productivity of the support team members.
Here are some common channels organizations are still using as a primary mode of providing IT support to internal teams:
1. Email support
Email support is one of the most common channels for seeking IT support. Employees can send an email describing their issue or request, and the help desk team can respond with the necessary guidance or resolution. Email support allows for a written conversation record and provides a convenient way to communicate asynchronously.
Challenge: Due to the high volume of requests, responding to each email with a solution becomes a long process for support teams. Also, email-based service requests are complex to prioritize as they are scattered across the inbox.
2. Phone support
Phone support enables employees to directly call the help desk team and discuss their issues or requests. This channel allows for real-time communication and immediate assistance. Phone support is beneficial for urgent or complex issues that require immediate attention.
Challenge: In the case of phone-based help desks, it is difficult for support teams to get an in-depth understanding of the challenges employees face. As a result, the solutions are generally half-baked, and employees tend to seek support again.
3. Self-service portal
A self-service portal allows employees to access a knowledge base or help center where they can find answers to frequently asked questions, troubleshooting guides, tutorials, and other resources. A well-designed self-service portal empowers employees to resolve common issues independently, reducing the workload on the help desk and enabling self-learning.
Challenge: These service portals are generally compatible with users with sound technical knowledge. Non-technical users require some time to get a grasp of these portals due to their complex UI. The learning curve is steep for self-service portals.
Based on the challenges associated with the most used IT help desk solutions, it is clear that employees seek live assistance where they can get specific solutions to their queries. Additionally, they also look for simpler tools where they can submit their requests, especially those who don’t have a strong technical background.
The one solution that can fill all these gaps is a conversational IT help desk. Keep reading to know why.
Why conversational IT help desks can be a solution?
Conversational IT help desks leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) technologies to provide a more interactive and intuitive support experience. They enable employees to seek assistance using natural language, just like having a conversation with a real person.
If you think of any Generative AI solution, for instance, ChatGPT, you will notice that users of all segments, irrespective of their technical skills, can get the desired outputs from it. The reason is relevance and empathetic support.
And GenAI is here to stay. According to the latest study, Generative AI could add $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually across 63 use cases, with corporate IT being one of them.
Here are some reasons why conversational IT help desks are a betteralternative to traditional IT help desks:
1. Instant and personalized support
Conversational IT help desks provide instant, interactive, and personalized support to employees. By leveraging AI and NLP, it can understand the context of the request, ask clarifying questions, and provide tailored solutions. This eliminates the need for employees to navigate complex knowledge bases or wait for human support agents to respond.
2. 24/7 Availability
Conversational IT help desks can provide support around the clock, ensuring that employees have access to assistance whenever they need it. This is particularly useful for organizations with a global and distributed workforce where employees work in different time zones.
3. Self-learning and continuous improvement
Conversational IT help desks constantly learn and improve through machine learning algorithms. They can analyze support interactions, identify patterns, and optimize responses over time. This leads to more accurate and efficient support, as the system learns from previous interactions and applies that knowledge to future requests.
4. Scalability and cost-efficiency
Conversational IT help desks can handle multiple support requests simultaneously, making them highly scalable. They can support multiple employees simultaneously, reducing wait times and improving efficiency.
5. Integration with existing systems
Conversational IT help desks can integrate with existing systems, such as ticketing systems, knowledge bases, and communication platforms. This allows for seamless data exchange and ensures that employees have access to up-to-date information and resources.
Final thoughts
Conversational IT help desks offer a modern and scalable solution to support employees. However, the question that remains here is - which conversational IT help desk to select?
Our vote, not so surprisingly, goes to - Atomicwork.
This GenAI-driven platform can help IT support teams with streamlined ticket resolution, proactive issue prevention, and efficient collaboration - all with conversational support. It empowers employees and provides them with consistent support through a personalized, ChatGPT-like bot.
To explore how it works, book a demo!