The new normal has brought about new practices and higher expectations in businesses. For example, most people have now embraced remote working as it’s being normalized during the pandemic. Also, there have been high expectations on employee productivity, emphasis on value creation, and the need for agility in operations.
All these expectations require efficient information technology (IT) systems in your workplace. Technology keeps improving each passing day, and the system used a year ago may not be as effective today. However, the demand of modern business requires improved IT support.
Businesses are now focused on adopting better, faster, and cheaper solutions for their IT needs. Most IT support systems are scalable, and improving them isn’t complicated.
Ways To Improve IT Efficiency
Your IT is the focal point in your business, therefore, efficiency can’t be compromised. There are several measures you can use to improve your IT support. The article discusses below how to improve IT support in your workplace.
1. Outsource IT Needs
Outsourcing your IT support is always an excellent option to improve efficiency, especially if you don’t have a skilled team or a good infrastructure in place to handle your needs.
Outsourcing is letting a company with more expertise and infrastructure handle the IT department. For example, you can get IT Support by TCG or other companies, including managed IT services, cloud computing, and professional advice.
These companies are professionals, they keep up-to-date on the latest trends in technology and promptly implement them in their IT systems. Consequently, your workplace will benefit from the latest and cutting-edge technology without investing in any new equipment.
Moreover, as the companies strive to provide value for customers, they’ll attend to any of your needs on time to ensure you’re satisfied. In turn, you get an efficient IT system that provides good value to your customers.
Also Read: 6 Things You Need To Know About Managed IT Services
2. Understand User Expectations
The end-user experience of the IT system is crucial as it dictates how your customer feels about your business. For example, an efficient and user-friendly website gains more satisfied customers. While a website that takes time to load or irresponsive results in disappointed customers.
In any business, you should always set goals with users in mind. If you want to improve your IT support, don’t base your action plans on what others have done. Instead, conduct a thorough research about your users and use it as a guide to improve.
Understanding what your users need is vital. For instance, if they need more self-service options and instead you adopt more innovative tools, the improvement may not be beneficial because the user’s needs were not fulfilled.
Explore questions that may answer what the users want from your IT support. This will give you the clarity to set relevant goals in pursuing more efficiency from your system. By delivering solutions to your user’s needs, you’ve improved the majority of the issues affecting your IT system.
3. Adopt Task Automation
Everyday tasks such as password reset requests account creations, and email verifications are repetitive and don’t require human intervention to run. However, some businesses still handle such requests manually, by doing this, the team focuses on tasks that don’t add value to the business.
Having your IT team handle non-core tasks fosters inefficiency on the IT support’s part and is not good for the business’ productivity.
Therefore, it’s vital to adopt task automation in the business. First, you can start with simple administration tasks such as account creations. Secondly, you can move to other complex tasks which still follow a defined structure, such as data backup.
With task automation, self-service among users will increase, down-time in operations will decrease, and the team can focus on core tasks. This will increase task completion, IT system efficiency, and reduce operational costs and improve user experience.
4. Streamline Knowledge Management
In some companies, customers and employees struggle to find the required information. However, this doesn’t mean that the information isn’t available, it only means that the information hasn’t been made easily accessible to them.
Therefore, if a customer or an employee wants help with the system, like account verification, they have to spend time looking for the information or they might need to ask for help from another employee.
This typically affects the efficiency of IT support in the workplace. In a time where digitization has been embraced, finding knowledge shouldn’t be a problem. You should streamline knowledge and make it accessible through the following ways:
- Publish a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section on your website that answers some of the commonly asked questions and inquiries made by customers.
- Create IT-related support content and publish it on your blog page. Involve experts when creating such content. The content will then guide employees and customers in self-service operations.
- Make sharing knowledge between users and employees easy by using collaborative tools, especially when working remotely.
Such tips will facilitate IT-related knowledge sharing and improve efficiency in the workplace.
5. Prioritize Issues Based On Severity
Urgency or severity of issues and requests can be classified as high, medium, and low. For example, if the company’s servers are down and the system can’t load, that is considered a high case issue and needs to be urgently addressed. However, if employee requests help with their passwords, it’s categorized as a low case issue, as self-service can handle it.
You can adopt an IT ticketing system that categorizes issues and requests in those three groups. Furthermore, you can design and implement a support software that can allow employees to set triggers that will prioritize tickets depending on urgency.
This will help ensure that there will be no urgent ticket that needs immediate solutions mixed in the pool of low-case tickets.
The same case can also be used in security warnings to differentiate false positives and actual threats. Therefore, more focus will be directed to what is important and what will affect your IT system. By resolving it as soon as possible, your IT support remains efficient.
6. Through Agile Thinking
Agile methodology is common in project management and software development and can improve IT support efficiency. The methodology focuses on the principle that things can change, so instead of having a waterfall plan that encompasses everything, businesses should adopt short-term goals.
This helps businesses to implement feedback in their processes and remove hurdles as soon as they arise.
In IT support, being flexible and agile will help you implement different changes in your system to create constant and continual improvement. This includes adopting scalable solutions such as cloud computing, which allows businesses to scale their data backup and recovery depending on demand.
Also, IT support can identify and implement customer and employee feedback in every update to ensure efficiency.
7. Utilize A Service Catalogue
Communication is crucial for any IT-focused organization. Both employees and customers will demand frictionless communication and timely delivery of services. Therefore, you should create, constantly update, and share your service catalog both internally and externally.
With a service catalog, end-users in your IT system will know the services you offer, the cost, the delivery system, and the expected service level. This helps provide clarity and consistency in your service delivery by bringing all the members to one page.
Also, a service catalog can automate tasks such as ticket deflection, allowing agents to focus on crucial tasks.
8. Understand What Matters
When gauging the efficiency of the IT support desk, you may get it all wrong by looking at the wrong metrics. When you have a long list of reports, you may take more time trying to comprehend them instead of improving on areas that need improvement.
Therefore, you should have key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help measure progress from time to time. In IT support efficiency, some of the main KPIs to measure include the following:
- Level Zero Solvable: This will tell you how much can be moved to self-service and its success.
- Average Response Time: It tells the average time between receiving a request and response. It should be as short as possible. Taking longer will frustrate employees and customers.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): It helps measure the human element’s success in the IT support desk.
With these KPIs, you can know where you are and where you need to be to ensure the efficiency of the IT support.
9. Through Employee Training
Skill gaps or an inadequate number of IT agents can hinder your efforts for more efficient IT support. Therefore, you should invest in training your employees to hone their IT skills. If you change your system or adopt new software, you should also upskill your team.
Well-trained employees and self-service features can handle most of the issues from customers. This will reduce escalation of issues as much as possible to only those that need expert help. Hence, more productivity and more efficiency in IT support.
Also Read: 7 Ways Managed IT Services Drive Small Business Growth
Conclusion
Your IT desk plays a very important role in your business. However, challenges such as miscommunication, skills gap, focusing on the wrong metrics, among others, may hinder the achievement of efficiency in the IT support.
Fortunately, you can change all these with some crucial practices. Implementing the ways discussed in this article can improve IT support in your workplace.