ITSM Service Desk – 7 Best Practices to Benefit Your Enterprise

Generally, the primary purpose of a service desk team is to reduce the number of tickets, provide timely solutions, save time & money and enhance user productivity. However, when a service desk team fails to follow practices that extend the software efficiency, it increases the number of tickets, late resolutions, and higher downtimes.
The good thing is, with proper practices and processes in place, increasing service desk efficiency and providing quick solutions becomes effortless. Check out these seven best practices for IT service desks that will level up your business value.

Define a roadmap

The first ITSM practice that enterprises should follow is to prepare a thorough roadmap for their ITSM actions. Unfortunately, one of the common mistakes that the IT support team needs to correct is the wrong estimation of their present ITSM maturity. Therefore, it makes sense to assess the ITSM maturity and then define areas of ITSM that need some work.

Use a structured method for tracking and guiding the progress of your ITSM implementation projects. First, determine KPIs, know the success factors, offer appropriate framework guidance, and know the expected state to be achieved at every level of implementation. Then, as stated, think around the implementation phase and end-user response, and depending on that, make provisions for improvement.

Integrate automation

It’s a well-known fact that when applied correctly, automation leads to excellent efficiency. Enterprises should ensure that they automate mapped-out tasks to avoid unexpected outcomes. It’s wise to automate tasks that have an existing capability to automate at some level. More often than not, automation works best for regular tasks that need consistency.

Automation in your IT service desk software reduces human intervention, frees human agents to focus on more complex tasks, and offers self-service portals to end-users, which will promote self-help and reduce the number of tickets. As said to the rest, remember that automation does not have to replace humans. On the contrary, it should expand the experience positively.

Train your agents

There is always room for improvement in the IT industry. Therefore, you must organize regular training sessions to instil essential corporate beliefs in your agents and keep them up to date on recent advancements and trends. In addition, you should train your support staff to go above and beyond to exceed user expectations. As a result, they can hone their abilities and broaden their knowledge in areas where they need to improve.

Regular and consistent employee training at all levels provides significant benefits to businesses. Non-IT personnel, for example, can be trained to respond to incidents at specific levels, allowing IT personnel to interact with higher-level incidents quickly. Furthermore, teams that have received proper training are more persuasive and communicate more effectively.

Set SLAs
If you’re not using SLA to track an enterprise’s performance against its objectives, are you even getting the most out of your IT service desk software? SLAs help managers measure the success of services depending on the expectations built. It’s a tough battle to track and customize goals for several teams, priority levels, and geographies without SLAs, thus making them the most essential.
One of the most excellent service desk practices that enterprises must follow is setting SLAs. A good IT service desk solution works best when tracking SLAs. SLAs must be easy-to-understand and customizable. When a company fails to meet an SLA, it can have a negative impact on employee productivity.

Encourage self-service
One of the best ITSM service desk practices is to provide a self-service portal to the end users. An AI-enabled self-service portal allows users to resolve their concerns without creating a request and taking the help of the IT support team. With a self-service portal, the number of tickets raised at a service desk reduces, users can get back to work quickly, and technicians can focus on more essential tasks.
Moreover, self-service portals should include a knowledge base option. While you implement a knowledge base into your self-service portal, make it simple for the users to find information about the problem they’re having. Ensure the service portal includes a link to your knowledge base and an advanced search feature to direct users to the appropriate content.

Direct tickets to relevant technicians
Next to setting SLAs is ITSM practice to direct tickets to relevant technicians. Directing tickets to the technicians qualified to resolve them saves time and increases productivity. This might entail identifying specialized issues and forwarding them to a team member with experience in that area and escalating urgent requests to more experienced staff.
An IT service desk software may incorporate innovative technology such as automation and AI in ticket routing. For example, it can quickly route incidents to the appropriate channel for resolution by recognizing similar requests.

Utilize the service catalog
Lastly, utilize an IT service catalog to make the most use of your IT service desk. The service catalog is an aspect of the IT service desk that employees can see on their dashboards. In simple words, an IT service catalog is an accessible document that helps users find IT services, support, software, and hardware.
Communication is critical to the success of your service management strategy. Your service catalog explains what to expect from your agents, customers, and managers, which can increase their adoption of ITSM and self-service solutions.

In summary,
Enterprises do not aspire to devote their time and cost to resolving internal concerns all the time; instead, they would invest them in growing their business – this makes optimizing your service desk all the more critical. Therefore, adopt these service desk practices and improve the efficiency and productivity of your enterprise.