End-to-End Workflow Management Best Practices
Your IT helpdesk provides an essential role of facilitating and orchestrating your end-to-end support workflows. As the primary point of contact for the user, the helpdesk agent is responsible for capturing and assessing user needs, engaging the right support resources, and ensuring issues are resolved as quickly as possible. Your effectiveness in orchestrating the support workflow will impact both user satisfaction and the duration of productivity impact to business processes. Some IT helpdesk best practices for workflow management include:
Don’t re-enter data
Be efficient about what information you collect, how you store it, and how you share information with others taking part in supporting the user. Most duplicate data entry takes place when helpdesk management systems are not properly integrated with other tools and vendor platforms. Investing in data integration and workflow interfaces will improve the quality and timeliness of support.
Let your system manage handoffs
IT support issues can be complex and handing them off among team members can be both time consuming and a source of miscommunication. Your helpdesk management or ITSM system includes workflow management capabilities that can help facilitate handoffs, both with other support teams and with other agents within the helpdesk. Leverage these system capabilities to ensure handoffs happen smoothly and essential information is not lost in the transition.
Have a plan for re-opening resolved tickets
in a consistent way. Helpdesk processes are workflows and they work well in a sequence, but situations where they go in loops can be problematic. The key is to have a consistent policy and process for how to handle resolved tickets that need to be re-opened to ensure effective and accurate SLA reporting. Some options include opening a new ticket (with a new SLA) and linking it to an original, changing the status of the original ticket to “work in progress” (continuing the current SLA clocks), or creating a sub-task of the parent ticket (this is a more complex option). The approach you decide on isn’t as important as handling this situation consistently.