Help desk software can ensure that IT departments work more efficiently and help organisations resolve tech issues faster. How? Simply put, a help desk eliminates numerous manual processes, streamlines workflows, and organises information.

Efficient Working

Office workers can easily submit issues and get their tech issues addressed faster, allowing everybody to spend more time on productivity and less time twiddling thumbs. IT professionals, on the other hand, spend less time on unnecessary manual processes thus freeing up valuable time for more important work.

Smarter Multitasking, Even on the Move

A help service desk system allows IT professionals to prioritise and categorise issues more easily, allowing them to better sequence the issues to be addressed. For instance, a tech may prefer handling multiple similar issues in a single trip from the server room thus making better use of their time.

All IT Requests in One Place

Help desk systems typically include a user portal that provides a single place for users to create tickets. View the status of open issues, and close out tickets after they are resolved. A portal can be an effective tool for relaying essential information to users such as scheduled downtime thus helping reduce unnecessary tickets.

Customise to Better Meet Needs

A help desk ticket, at the very basic level, includes a title and description of each issues. For better categorisation and more detailed information, a company can create custom field such as building location, department, floor number, etc. and then create reports based on that data.

Analyse IT Trends and Improve Overall Workflow

Help desks let you track metrics, such as the average time taken to resolve tickets, which means that IT departments can run detailed reports to unearth trends. For instance, if you find that a particular tech is very good at a certain task, it can be a good idea to give them all related tickets to ensure maximum efficiency.

Prioritise Critical Tasks

Different tickets require different responses depending on severity. Replacing an old keyboard for a single individual is considerably of less importance than repairing a malfunctioning server which affects the organisation in its entirety. A help desk system can allow technicians to easily prioritise and sort tickets to ensure that high severity tickets are resolved quickly and are less likely to fall through the cracks.

Auto-Assign Help Desk Tickets

The best help desk software is capable of analysing tickets and assigning issues automatically based on specific criteria. For example, all hardware issues can be sent to Bob and all software issues to Tom. Alternatively, all tickets from Marketing or Accounting can be assigned to Sally, and all tickets containing the word “password” to Mary.

Establish Better Expectations with Due Dates

A help desk makes it easy to set, track, and communicate changes to issue dates, which is not only helpful for the IT professional addressing the issues but also the employee that submitted it. Due dates can be assigned either manually or automatically, and tickets can be sorted by help desk technicians on the basis of the dates when projects should be completed.

Avoid Reinventing the Wheel

Some tech issues reoccur fairly often. If you have a help desk system, relevant notes can be recorded on any ticket. The files needed to resolve the issue can be uploaded. Later, anybody on the IT department’s helpdesk team can search through older tickets for assistance with similar issues.

Show Your Worth

Help desk reporting allows you to easily run reports showing the number of tickets that were resolved in the last year, month, quarter, or year for just you or the whole IT department. Such reports are great tool to isolate technology problem areas and show the value brought by IT professionals to the organisation.