IT Helpdesk Culture Best Practices
The IT helpdesk is a customer service function and the right attitude and mindset is required both by helpdesk agents and management. Cost management and efficiency may be important, but your main focus needs to be on user productivity. Your employees’ time is valuable and any time they spend engaging with the helpdesk is time they aren’t spending creating value for your company. Everyone involved in your helpdesk needs to have a user-centric mindset and apply it to both interactions and business processes.
Your helpdesk should provide a single point of contact for the life of the ticket or support issue. Many companies have complex organizational structures which include multiple tiers of support, specialized teams and may even include a network of suppliers and support vendors. Your users shouldn’t need to see or know about how your organization is structured – they should see that when they engage the helpdesk, they have one point of contact that they work with throughout the life of their issue and that contact manages everything that takes place behind the scenes. It is tempting for companies to hand off cases from one team to another. This creates a frustrating and fragmented experience for users wherein they may not know who to talk to if they have questions or need status updates.
Don’t expose client to internal issues. No operation runs smoothly all the time, but IT helpdesks are an area within the company where internal issues such as business processes, staffing issues, coordination challenges and vendor contract issues are often projected to end-users. Examples of this include:
"We’ve assigned a 48-hour response time to this ticket and we’re still within our SLA" – 48 hours is your own internal performance benchmark, not the customer expectation. They called you with a problem and want the issue solved as quickly as possible.
"We’re waiting for a response from our vendor for that item and they only provide support M-F during business hours." – Your helpdesk is responsible for the overall service provided to the end user. Supplier issues are your internal concern. From the customer perspective, the helpdesk is unable to provide them the support they require when they need it.
"We’re required to go through all of the activities on the troubleshooting script before escalating the ticket to tier-2 support." – This situation is really frustrating for users. If you know you can’t solve their problem, they expect you to engage someone who can and not waste their time going through a checklist.
Each of these statements is an example of internal helpdesk issues impacting the support experience for your users. Your helpdesk should mask users from these internal issues and take ownership of the end-to end support experience. You are the face of IT to the user and challenges that occur behind the scenes are your helpdesk’s responsibility to manage so the user doesn’t have to.
Beware of over-doing self-service. Your user’s time is valuable and while self-service capabilities may be a great way to provide operational efficiencies and enable users to address simple and common issues quickly without the delays of waiting to talk to a helpdesk agent, remember that your helpdesk is there to provide help and assistance in the form of tools, knowledge and experience. Self-service capabilities are there to enhance the user’s support experience, not replace it. You don’t want to inadvertently outsource your IT support to your end-users and diminish the value of your helpdesk function. Self-service support is often seen as a tempting strategy for “ticket avoidance” and a way to drive down IT helpdesk costs. IT helpdesk best practices suggest that you should focus on the total cost of the disruption to your business and not just the direct cost of helpdesk operations. Your IT helpdesk mindset should be focused on resolving and avoiding user issues, not avoiding tickets.