As IT environments become increasingly complex, providing efficient IT support is becoming a major challenge for organizations. Especially in the post-pandemic world, organizations are heavily reliant on technology for managing hybrid work trends, remote access, customer experience, and mobility. These new work models further highlight the need for sustained tech support.
A streamlined and automated help desk is an increasingly vital part of delivering quality service and improving agent efficiency. While help desk automation can boost the capabilities of an IT organization in various aspects, an ineffective ticketing system can cause operational bottlenecks, and eventually impact customer experience.
Here are some common issues:
1. Unsatisfactory customer service
Having a manual or homegrown ticketing system means that your important information resides in silos and you do not have efficient protocols in place to solve customer queries. An inadequate information system results in long resolution times for customer tickets which may leave them unhappy with your services. Without an organized ticketing process and request tracking protocol, you also miss out on capturing important KPIs like common issues and mean ticket resolution times.
2. Decreased employee productivity
Whether it is an external ticket or an internal issue, the goal should be to solve it immediately so your employees can get back to more critical tasks. If your support teams are spending more time on finding the accurate information and are debating the best option to solve a particular problem, it will result in a longer resolution time. This means that fewer tickets get resolved in a longer time period, negatively impacting employees productivity.
3. Ineffective utilization of hardware assets
ITAM and help desk integrations provide organizations with the crucial hardware asset data to help them make the most out of these investments. They also enable forecasting of future procurement needs. Lack of an integrated infrastructure means that the support teams don’t have substantial information to solve the issues tied with user equipment. Furthermore, many organizations track their IT asset information on spreadsheets or other outdated tools, making future budgeting and procurement decisions difficult.
4. Recurring issues
Lack of help desk automation results in unresolved, recurring external and internal issues. Without the data analysis that comes with ITSM and ITAM integration, your support staff cannot identify systemic hardware problems, and instead spend time solving the same issues over and over again. Without a structured system, it is significantly more challenging to solve recurring issues and reduce the number of incoming tickets.
Help desk automation and ITAM
From handling customer tickets to managing your own internal systems using ITAM integrated help desk automation drives efficiency, accuracy, and proficiency. By combining your ITSM and ITAM capabilities, you can easily automate the following processes:
1. Automate alerts and notifications
Automated alerts and notifications improve communication within your teams and keep your support teams notified whenever a ticket is created, approved, rejected, or resolved. By integrating your ITAM software with your help desk, you can choose to get these notifications via email or on your software web application. Set alerts for the actions that you want to be notified for so your IT support teams can always stay on top of their IT service management..
2. Leverage a knowledge base
For simple and recurring hardware related issues, you can easily create a knowledge base so your employees (requesters) can first try to solve their primary issues themselves without always having to create a ticket and involve the IT team. With every asset’s details, you can upload best practice guides for asset utilization, servicing or troubleshooting hardware assets, details on when the maintenance is due for every device, vendor contract details for compliance purposes, and more. This can help reduce the ticket volume and save time all the while providing an easy self-service experience.
3. Onboarding and offboarding workflows
Robust ITAM tools come with onboarding and offboarding workflows to make sure that your IT assets are being utilized in the best possible manner. Integrating ITAM tools with a help desk helps you generate and escalate tickets whenever new employees are coming in or are leaving the organization.
You can dispatch IT assets in bulk to all the new employees by pulling the information from integrated mobile device management (MDM) software applications. Likewise, you can set alerts for whenever an employee is leaving so a ticket is created to remind you that you have to collect the hardware IT assets assigned to them and revoke the access to software applications they were using.
4. Automate regular syncs and backups
As your ITAM software will be fetching information from all the devices in your network, you can choose to schedule syncs and device backups either daily, weekly, or monthly. With help desk automation, you can also push updates for regular security or software updates without having to worry about backing up the existing data. Your customer information, asset data, ticketing history, shared responses, and other information is automatically backed up in the cloud in a periodic manner while your updates get installed without any downtime.
5. Enhance incident management
Integrating your ITAM software with a help desk enables you to identify and prioritize tickets that are critical. For example, if a ticket is created for an upcoming software expiration, it will be marked urgent. Your IT team can escalate that issue and resolve it before any compliance problems arise. You can create ticket escalation rules and permissions by determining the importance of tickets generated for new device requests, upcoming device maintenance tickets, devices approaching end of life, malware alerts for hardware, and more.
6. Reports and analytics
Manually measuring the KPIs for your IT service management processes can lead to unavoidable errors, biases, and improper analyses. With ITAM-integrated help desk automation, you can generate accurate reports on the state of your IT assets, their health, utilization, compliance, number of software seats being used by your employees, and more. You can choose to retrieve these reports from any time duration and can automate the system to generate these reports periodically. Furthermore, you can even pin these reports and graphs on your ITAM dashboard so you can stay updated regarding your IT processes at all times.
Benefits of help desk automation with ITAM
Integrating efficient ITAM software with your help desk enhances your service delivery, improves issue resolution time, streamlines business processes, and eventually provides better customer experience. When your internal tickets are being resolved in time and your employees are equipped with the right tools, they are more productive, innovative, and resourceful.
Here are a few major benefits that you can enjoy with such an integration:
1. Reduced mean resolution time
When receiving and solving tickets, you are equipped with real-time information for all your assets — their ownership, utilization, and other relevant details. This facilitates you in solving the issues quicker, thus decreasing the mean resolution time.
2. Accurate reporting
With network discovery and regular syncs, you can always have accurate data about where your assets are, how they are being used, and how long they are being checked out for. With this information on hand, you can easily create tickets whenever you get alerts for assets maintenance or retirement. This 360-degree view of your assets helps you reduce the number of malfunctioning assets, loss of stolen assets, and other such issues.
3. Increased employee productivity
If your team resolves tickets faster and fulfills more requests, it can get back to other tasks that are critical for your business development and continuity. Help desk automation directly impacts your employee productivity as your IT teams won’t have to go in blind while solving internal issues or spend a lot of time checking spreadsheets to extract the relevant information.
Read more: Key Features Of Powerful ITSM Software And How It Benefits Your Business
About AssetSonar
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For more assistance, drop us an email at support@ezo.io. You can also visit our blog for detailed support posts.
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