Why is the IT Help Desk Important to Business?

How effective is your IT help desk in helping your customers? Is it supporting your business?

A company’s relationship with its customers does not end at the purchase of a product or a subscription to a service. If they encounter issues using the offerings, a company representative must be available most of the time to receive their inquiries. 

In the same way, whenever staff experiences technical issues with computers, telephones, and other office equipment, the disruption can affect their productivity. This is where the role of the IT help desk software comes in: a platform where employees and other users can report technical issues. It is also the base where IT administrators can systematically address these cases.

Defining a help desk

Traditionally, the help desk is defined as a group of people providing help and information for problems related to electronics, software, or computers. Before the internet era, most companies received customers’ concerns over the phone or in face-to-face interaction. The situation carried certain challenges. For example, a customer might try to call the company only to encounter a busy phone line; sometimes the company representative on the other line could not provide a solution. The customer then takes the next inconvenient step of bringing the product in question to the original shop where they hope they can encounter an “expert” who will solve the problem.

In the 1870s when the telephone was first invented, only the more privileged ones could afford directly communicating with the original store about their problem. In the 1960s, the rise of call centers allowed big companies to hire staff dedicated to receiving and addressing customer inquiries. From the late 1980s to the 2000s, technology like email and desktop computers made customer interaction faster and more efficient. 

Then since 2008, the rise of social media platforms made companies and their representatives even more accessible to customers. An angry or upset customer could post their complaint on a very public social media network. Afraid of getting more negative feedback, the company representative would respond almost immediately. 

How IT help desks work

A standard help desk in the 21st century removes all these difficulties by becoming the central hub by which company representatives and customers can interact. The IT help desk is a software that streamlines the functions normally performed by human customer service people. Aside from receiving inquiries, it prioritizes the more urgent concerns, while being able to immediately pull out a predetermined resolution for a recurring issue. With this software, every inquiry can be tracked, categorized, and prioritized based on a number of factors such as urgency.

The following features can be commonly found in an IT help desk software:

• Auto-Assign (Allocating queries to staff based on the knowledge or skills required)
• Common Resolutions for Recurring Issues
• User/Customer Portal
• Custom Service Level Agreements
• Issue Management
• IT Purchase Requests
• Asset Scanning
• Analytics/Reporting
• Integration With Other IT Tools

Customer satisfaction

The IT Help Desk ensures customer satisfaction and the company’s long-term profitability because it help resolves customer queries and complaints in an accurate and organized manner. However, customers can experience technical problems at any time. As such, the system must have responsive support even outside business hours. Competitive companies do this by outsourcing their IT support.

Fast response

Company staff can benefit from a systematic way of reporting technical problems at work. They follow a set of procedures on how to approach each case. They can access computer systems remotely to fix problems themselves. Moreover, they can monitor the performance of the network through a central server, helping them detect potential problems and resolving them before these get worse. This overall process minimizes job interruption, and gets employees back on track to focus on more important work to be done. 

Increase efficiency

With help desk software, each case can be prioritized based on type, severity, and urgency. A query can be assigned to designated IT staff who have the expertise for addressing the problem. Larger help desks even categorize cases based on their levels of complexity. For instance, first-level questions are typically answerable by the Frequently Answered Question (FAQ) page. If certain issues cannot be solved at the first level, the case is then transferred to the second level for the more knowledgeable staff to handle. This way, both employees and customers are confident that they will receive quality assistance.

On one hand, customers trust that companies can provide support for their queries. On the other hand, efficient systems can minimize revenue loss due to unaddressed technical issues. One role of the IT department, then, is to initiate and streamline IT help desk improvements in a manner that improves existing customer and employee systems, with the potential of boosting business returns.