Help Desk Best Practices

Kim Chan

11 years ago

Using “best practices” is the most efficient way of getting things done, and improving your organization. Employing best practices will give you no choice but to evaluate your company’s current practices and compare them to the ones your competitors use.

This is especially relevant to help desk organizations, or any organization that provides help desk services. Customer satisfaction and loyalty starts with superior help desk service. Knowing that it can be hard to determine which help desk practices to employ, we thought we would compile a list of must-use practices for help desk professionals.

4 Best Practices Help Desk Teams Should Use

Provide your help desk team with constant training and feedback
One mistake that many organizations make is that they wait until the yearly evaluations to tell their help desk staff what they can be doing better. It is important to keep your team updated on new releases of software and hardware they support, on who their clientele is, and to constantly provide training on the applications they use and feedback on how they are doing. This way, better results are delivered.

Communication, communication, communication
It’s a no brainer – communication is the most important aspect of any profession. In the help desk industry, all-round communication is essential. Not only is it important for managers to communicate with their help desk staff to ensure everything is going smoothly, all members of the help desk team should always be on the same page. This way, they can share tips on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to helping customers with issues. Last but not least, the help desk team should constantly communicate with their customers, to assure them that they understand the issues, and update them on progress.

Make things easier for customers, and for yourselves
Create a repository of common issues for both team members and customers. Customers should be able to access a knowledge base of easy-to-solve problems that they can just take care of themselves. Help desk staff can share a different repository of common issues as well as tips on how to solve them. This will reduce the number of tickets, and increase customer satisfaction. It can also help improve job satisfaction for the help desk team by letting them focus on more challenging problems.

Provide help desk staff with the right tools
The use of help desk software allows help desk tickets to be resolved in a faster and more organized way. This improves customer satisfaction, and is often the easiest way of providing remote help desk service. There are a variety of help desk tools available. By researching and choosing the right one, you will be on your way to managing your team, as well as staying on top of costs, schedules, and helping your help desk team provide superior help desk support.