Help Desk Services to Provide You with Whatever You Need
Any business aspiring to grow diversely needs to handle their clientele strongly and efficiently. Rapid response to any query, or providing information needed by the customer as fast as it can be are some crucial services that a business has to provide for their customers. A help desk is the one-stop point that secures the positive impressions of a customer.
You Too Can Excel: Introducing IT Help Desk Services
An IT help desk is a platform which is entitled to provide assistance and help regarding customer problems and for gathering valuable information by communicating with numerous customers and clients for the planning and development of information technology unit. An IT help desk helps users to solve their problems through single or multiple point of contact, troubleshoot their problems, track their issues, get assistance regarding products, services, processes or any other technical issues.
The Cruxes
- IT help desk offers answers to technical questions of its users.
- It performs remote troubleshooting through technique diagnosis, pertinent questions, determining the solutions based on issues and details provided by the customers.
- An IT help desk records events and problems and their resolutions in log to follow up and update customer status and passes on any feedback and suggestion provided by the customer.
Types of IT Help Desk Services
There are basically five categories of help desk services. The different types are explained below:
- Web Help Desk: This type of service is deployed via the cloud where all the necessary customer data is stored. This service includes maintenance, updates etc. Usually, SMEs utilize these types of services.
- On Premise Help Desk: An on-premise help desk is a highly customizable help desk system and is bought and set up on the customer’s servers. It ensures smooth software transitions into business. On-premise help desk services are usually aimed at larger corporation as it needs thorough regular maintenance.
- Enterprise Help Desk: This type of help desks provides services for in-house assistance by providing support to both the employees and customers of the company.
- Open-source Help Desk: This type of help desk services is available for anyone, as it comes off open source and at free of cost. But it is one of the most vulnerable systems among the others and needs efficient technicians to maintain it. This makes it less available for the SMEs.
- Cloud-based Help Desk: This type of system can be locally installed but they are totally cloud-based. This type of help desks can withstand larger amount of data and be accessed anytime, anywhere.
Why Do You Need IT help desk services?
IT help desk service providers are much more than just a software or technical support expert and much updated which can integrate with self-service portals to answer questions about IT processes, can give the IT leaders visibility into the recurring questions and cases so they can find solutions and create standardized processes to fix issues. It is the first point of contact for any customer or employee to get help regarding any IT issues. It helps in cutting down the frustration and waste of time as it provides a one stop service that is easily accessible. IT help desk is a cardinal for any customer centric business and enhance productivity.
| 1. 85% of the employees are not engaged in their workplaces 2. 81% of the employees would leave their jobs for the right offer 3. Companies with high employee engagement are 21% more profitable Ref: 1. Gallup’s State of the Global workplace, 2. A report by Hays plc 3. Meta-analysis report by Gallup. |
Don’t Fall Behind Your Competitors
| According to Forbes, good company culture increases an organization’s revenue by 4 times. Then again, a report by Business Wire shows that 50% of the employees are unable to find the necessary information they need at work, 19% cannot find necessary information within the current system, 17% of them are denied access to the information, 16% employees are unable to approach the internal subject matter in time. |
There are some in-house problems followed by, cost inefficiency, waste of time and other problems which are uncommon if IT help desk services are outsourced to out-house parties. Some of the reasons which provokes the decision of outsourcing the IT help desk solutions are:
- Provide like a Pro: Aforementioned table of statistics shows what keeps you behind your competitors and how. An IT help desk prevents all the upcoming problems beforehand by providing all the customers with the necessary information with same priority and enhances customer support service.
- Healthy Expenses: Money is the most important factor in decision making processes of any business. Outsourcing IT help desk services can help in saving money in the form of increased productivity, as it is available to the customers for anything and everything.
- Rapid Responses: All the employees can respond to any service as soon as it gets in hands with a chosen customer service professional eliminating the time wasted waiting and can respond to network connectivity issues and also stay ahead of the updates.
- Refocus on the Nucleus: Outsourcing IT help desk services helps the IT department to focus on the core management of the business procedures and priorities.
- Diversify Employment: Outsourcing helps in employing diverse people for your business purpose so that they are expert in various IT services without expanding the in-house IT department.
Know What might Happen
Like every other sector, outsourcing IT help desk services has its cons that holds back the aspired outcome as it happens to be disconnected with the organization. Some of the problems are-
- Help desk staff are not aligned with the goals and culture causing friction and upset the way the end users are treated.
- Outsourcing vendors might not have enough understanding of the operations of the organization especially when it comes to the context and impact of IT issues hence turning the result into unexpected one.
- The quality of service and customer knowledge might get affected by the vendor moves affecting the whole personal level customer supplier relationship.
- The potential disconnection between outsourced help desk and the customer might turn the approach of providing solutions into cold and frigid.
- Outsourcing has one most common barrier of language and culture, which interrupts the conversation flow and the way of understanding the problem.
- The customer-supplier relation might become fraught due to a variety of reasons and put both the parties in a situation where they both want to reap the best result of the contract which turns the result in a lose-lose situation.
Everything to Remember: Mitigating Inherent Risks
All the risks that come along with outsourcing IT help desk services, can be avoided by taking precaution and risk management process. Some of the procedure to be taken are explained below:
- Avoid losing control: the provider and the team should have transparency and visibility over anything that concerns your business. An owner should ensure the clear understanding of the project, the provided services should be aligned with operational goals. Having a clear reporting system that identifies the necessary information supplies and promotes collaboration between them.
- Avoid losing skills and knowledge: Outsourcing IT services can make it difficult to bring a function back in house if losing in-house skills is not expected in the business. Identifying the most important skills and ensuring keeping team up-to-date are some things you can do to upgrade the skill base. Also, ensuring the update of documentation for the IT knowledge bank of the organization can be of great help.
- Geolocation: Political and local climate of the vendor affects the output of the service to be provided. Being clear about the required services and the compromise the organization might need to make in future and whether the provider is able to scale the business and support the development and growth of the business.
- Security and compliance: The first step to be risk-free is knowing and addressing the problem that can arise and no outsourcing is actually free of security issues. Understanding why and what data the vendor needs access to, the way of using the provided data by the vendor and the ways of them protecting it against any kind of breach. Background checking is also necessary beforehand.
- Be aligned: Being aligned with the objectives and operations of the business can be a challenge to take. But to avoid the risk of devaluation of the requirements, objectives and operations of your business, you should put the requirements to a chosen vendor who can develop a strategic partnership with your organization.
Facing Challenges for Our Client
About the Customer
FuxiIT is a customer that provides a host of IT applications. They provide a wide range of IT solutions for their customers. They are based in Thailand and this was our first engagement with them.
The Challenge
The customer wanted an IT help desk to respond to the technical issues and queries coming from their customers.
Since they provided a diverse range of solutions and services, staffing the help desk was our biggest challenge as the technical support staff had to be:
- Proficient in technology and technical issues.
- Experienced in handling customer calls and responding to complex queries.
The provided Service
CCBD provided FuxiIT in a three-branched way-
- We staffed the remaining help desk with a team that is experienced in similar projects and has knowledge of a broad spectrum about the necessary technicalities.
- Though experienced enough, we provided handful training to further their capabilities on specific solutions and services so that they do not have to stumble upon any question and to respond those rapidly.
- We used the economies built in the outsourcing model to locate the IT help desk services and passed on the savings to the customer to meet their budget.
Customer Outcomes
“After carrying out an in-depth evaluation of the new service desk, we are assured to work with a transparent, fluid and efficient team. This is exactly the view we visioned before getting to work with CCBD” according to a member of FuxiIT. The remote IT help desk of FuxiIT is now performing in a condensed manner by constantly meeting and exceeding everything that was agreed upon with the customer. Till this date, no issue is logged and the customer is very happy with the ongoing support service. Rather CCBD reports that their customer has noted the following:
- All the technical queries are being handled precisely
- The responses about technical products and services are simplified.
- Support Cases are resolved by the built-up platform that is established for continuous improvement and automation.
After taking the services FuxiIT now operates in a very thorough and transparent manner. They have full access to the information and no hidden data or cost bothers them. Data analyzing, troubleshooting for their customers have made easy and reachable for them. Their transparency has resulted into positive remarks from their customers and the growth of their business is now notably boosted.
Conclusion
IT help desk services has made all the necessary information flow from one end to the other in a smooth, transparent and cost-effective manner. In every way, businesses are now all about skilled communication that enables a healthy progress in the business. Having a skilled and expert IT help desk can stimulate the customers and balance the way an organization deals with the operations within.
