Does Your Help Desk Have Good, Better or Best Practices? Part One

Best Practice simply means the most effective way that has been determined to accomplish a desired goal. In order to improve, an organization must assess its current practices against those used in other organizations. The following are some Help Desk Best Practices, summarized from Giva's whitepaper on this topic, recommended to be used when evaluating what your company is doing and why, and what your company should be doing and when, as well as what features and functions you should look for in help desk software.

Perform Customer Satisfaction Surveys on a Regular Basis

Daily customer satisfaction surveys performed by your call tracking software provide valuable information from a broad sampling of employees. It is important for your company to generate its own customized survey to keep a close pulse on help desk performance at any given time. A continuous customer satisfaction survey process improvement philosophy will drive customer satisfaction and loyalty to even higher levels.

Implement a Web-Based Knowledge Base Tool

The greatest asset of a service organization is the knowledge of its staff. By encouraging and rewarding employees to document their knowledge in a centralized knowledge base software system, it becomes available for all staff to leverage. Also, the customer can access this knowledge through a self-help portal potentially easing help desk traffic.

Implement a Web-Based Knowledge Base Tool With Real-time Reports, Dashboards, Metrics and Business Analytics

Having readily available reports for knowledge base value, knowledge base usage, knowledge base status and more can help knowledge managers better understand how their knowledge base is being used, which can further streamline help desk agent processes and increase self-help usage.

Implement Service Request Automation Processes In Your Help Desk Software

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Providing for uploading screenshots, or perhaps allowing agents remote terminal access to those whom they support can increase problem resolution speed.  Converting customer emails automatically to help desk tickets, configuring quick-ticket templates, predefined resolutions, and preset questions to ask agents as they create issues provide more options to optimize your help desk performance resulting in greater customer satisfaction.

Use the Help Desk Software System to Increase Communications with Agents and Customers

Communication among agents can help keep the help desk processes flow smoothly.  Some examples include: a scrolling marquee message for event alerts, data record lock notification, new agent assignee alert, important message alerts, and more.

Implement Customer Self-Help Portal Accessible 24 Hours/Day

Allowing customers to access a self-help portal to resolve issues, when appropriate, or create their own service requests, can save your organization a significant amount of money.

Use Real-Time Help Desk Reports, Dashboards, Metrics and Analytics

That which is not measured, cannot be managed!  Good real-time metrics can also result in higher-quality decision making by any involved personnel, including the CIO if needed.

For much more in-depth information please refer to Giva's whitepaper on Help Desk Best Practices.

Read on in part 2!