In this age of intense competition, employees need to be provided and be aware of effective internal service support if they are to deliver their best. However, it is necessary that service level expectations are set for the company and its employees to achieve support service excellence. Opinion about in-house help desk and their response times are varied but mostly skewed away unfavorably.

Support Services Expectations

One reason for the ambiguity could be that the support services may not be well documented or communicated, leaving them unclear or undefined. This causes expectations to be out of sync with the actual scenario. In the face of unclear or unknown expectations help desk personnel have no clue about meeting them and working at their own internal schedule. This lack of clarity affects service levels and breeds confusion and frustration on both sides of the help Ticket.

This situation can be overcome by ensuring that everyone shares the same response time expectations from support services and a few easy steps:

Well defined SLAs

Creating a well-defined service level agreement (SLA) or service catalog will result in better customer service. By defining services internally and externally and arriving at service levels that are mutually agreeable ensures that it is possible to set the proper customer service expectations and measure how services are provided.

Well defined SLAs and documented service expectations are critical to achieve support service…
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Knowledge base creation

In a help desk the support agents need to be capable of fixing issues on their own in most cases without assigning tickets to specialist teams. It is cheaper and more efficient for the user if the help desk has motivated agents with the knowledge to fix things. This knowledge flows from a knowledge base, an online library of documents, or articles featuring contracts and SLA’s about various systems and procedures to show how to deal with an issue that is raised.

Support staff expertise

For an efficient and excellent help desk hiring and retaining good employees is the way to go. Less turn-over in company employees means the need for simple support is reduced while employees also improve their skills over time. This builds expertise and skill levels in help desk resources, allowing them to be managed more efficiently to solve more difficult issues.

End-to-end issue tracking

In an efficient help desk both the user and the help desk staff should be able to tell the status of the issue at a glance and this can be achieved by tracking issues end-to-end. It ensures that there is transparency in the system and reduces frustration and anxiety for all parties leady to speedy resolution. This allows any staff member to jump in at any time to solve the issue, knowing exactly where it stands and what needs to be done. The user should also have updates regularly, with the option of tracking their issue on the web or by e-mail.

Help desk ticket category classification ensures ticket trend reporting efficiency, ticket…
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Issue categorizing and management

Help desk ticket category classification ensures ticket trend reporting efficiency, enhance the ticket escalation process, improve reporting, and reduce overall support costs. Categorization helps in efficient issue management and to improve upon them. Proper ticket categorization(ITIL) of an issue when a help desk ticket is created enables the agent to sort the issue into support buckets that will in-turn help knowledgebase creation, enable proper routing of escalated tickets, issue handling and trend reporting of ticket types.

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