Many types of incidents come through the IT help desk during an average month, but a few specific categories stand out that may require extra attention. Organizations can create a support ecosystem that gets them through everyday tasks, but unless they can deal with the unconventional incidents, their help desk teams will always be trying to play catch up.
Technology exists that can support self-service from employee service portals to virtual agents. There will be high volume requests, such as password resets, that are simple and easy to automate. However, there are three types of incidents that stand out, as support workers must have the tools they need to address these concerns, or will end up seeing their productivity decline.
1. Major Incidents
Large-scale incidents may not come up too often, but when they do hit, organizations need to be prepared to deal with them quickly and efficiently. For example, a situation in which an overnight server restart leads to app login problems for hundreds of users can have a huge impact on the business. As employees try to get to work the next day, they are left unable to get the job done because they are stuck waiting for the help desk team to reset login information and get updates out to users. At the same time, your help desk analysts come in to find a huge array of related support tickets waiting for them, leaving them in a situation where they have a huge clerical burden to work through just to get going on resolving issues.
In this kind of situation, you need to have an incident management system in place that can handle a large volume of support tickets, recognize when similar requests are coming in and consolidate them. It can also enable support employees to automatically send form messages out to end-users and share resolutions among the support team to accelerate responses. Using incident management to deal with these major issues quickly and efficiently is critical as large-scale issues can lead to protracted productivity losses. Dealing with these incidents quickly is vital.
2. Repetitive Incidents
Some incidents just keep coming up, regardless of what you do to resolve them. In some cases, they are merely common requests that tend to be high in volume such as a printer not working, or difficulty with wifi (particularly if you have remote workers). In other cases, these incidents are a sign of underlying problems with your IT configuration. However, if you are not in a place where problem management will work for your business, you must be prepared to use incident management to resolve these issues effectively. Without incident management, your support team is likely stuck dealing with these incidents each time they come up, and hopefully, remember what they did the last time so they can solve the issue quickly.
An incident management platform can integrate with knowledge management systems to identify repetitive incidents and give users the information they need to resolve them quickly. You can even create scripts to automatically resolve simple, repetitive incidents, ensuring that your help desk workers aren’t wasting their time on incidents that keep coming up.
3. Complex Incidents
Most of the incidents that come to the help desk are fairly simple, as we mentioned earlier. In that case, self-service tools can extend your helpdesk by providing support. If necessary, a level 1 engineer can go into a fully formed ticket, find a resolution, and notify the user. However, the occasional complex incident puts a major roadblock in this workflow. The support ticket will need to be opened and analyzed by the level 1 technician, and upon realizing that the issue is too complex, the user will need to pass the ticket up to a level 2 engineer. These transitions can cause incidents to slip through the cracks, or take incredibly long to resolve, particularly if you are working with a homegrown or basic service system. This not only impacts productivity for both the user and analyst but also raises the cost of support and resolution.
A dedicated incident management platform features the combination of workflow optimization, notifications, and incident tracking functions you need to handle complex incidents without running into trouble.
It may be tempting to think that you can save money with a lower cost or homegrown help desk, but large-scale, repetitive, and complex incidents require the kind of functionality that you can only get with a dedicated incident management platform. Ask how Serviceaide’s ChangeGear ITSM can meet your business needs and ensure you are equipped for whatever happens.
