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It has been three months past the New Year-2021. With enterprise facilities and service desk delivery becoming chaotic, it has become a real struggle for entrepreneurs like you to serve your employees effectively and meet their expectations throughout 2021 and beyond. 

As we are in the 1st quarter of New Year, you should reconsider the tools that are in use to support the employees now and then. For example, does your IT Service Desk solution have anything to surpass in employee support? If not, should you start taking risks with any new solution in the market? Count on the following 10 must-have qualities to streamline your service desk management and renew your employee experience in 2021. 

Signs of an Effective IT Service Desk

How to make the service desk management successful enough to meet the changing needs of an expanding organization post-COVID? At Rezolve.ai, we’ve got the same query multiple times. In the last year, we have seen enterprises getting oversensitive towards employee service. According to McKinsey, there is a 32% rise in the operating standards, collaborative tools, and pressure on the financial budget of organizations which CIOs have to deal with efficiently. 

This percentage is going to increase further -- we have stepped into 2021 and more than 2.5 months have gone by. With growing employee concerns, you should take every opportunity to become more capable and run an IT service desk effectively that comes under it. 

“Statistical Insight: The average ratio of desktop support technicians per 1,000 users is 21.9 in Finserv and 5.4 in the medicare industry (MetricNet).” 

What is an Effective Service Desk?

A service desk is a strategically designed platform managing service requests and fixing issues for end-users at a broader level. It supports a wide variety of ITSM activities to deliver high-value service support in real-time. 

The IT service desk is a single point of contact from which everyone in your organization starting from employees and customers to stakeholders can get support at any time without delay. 

Daily Challenges in Service Desk Management

Your IT service desk ensures frontline support, a system critical for empowering and managing your IT team successfully. It is both heart and mind when it comes to excellence in employee productivity in your organization. 

Tackling the challenges your service desk faces every day can help you lower management costs and provide superior employee service experiences. 

From hiring new employees and onboarding them to satisfying and retaining them, you can achieve all if you can overcome the following challenges: 

1. Unlimited service requests and disturbances - It often gets hard to shift between different channels, address service requests and resolve them fast. 

2. Long queue of tickets & missed issues - An IT service desk receives a lot of requests that can’t be handled unless it is digitally enabled and has automated tools to process. For example, the TechValidate survey in 2015 confirmed that around 43% of IT help desks depend on email to follow service requests. 

3. Repeated issues - In the absence of effective data recording and analysis tools, service desks won’ be able to easily find and resolve recurring problems. 

4. Difficulty in tracking user service history - Manually operated IT service desk fails to track service history of users, causing the same process of fixing repeat every time. 

5. Wasting time on the same time-taking process - Most of the time, the service desk has to struggle to resolve common time-taking issues without automated access to required details or processes. 

“Statistical Insight: The latest study confirmed that 93% of service teams think that customer support expectations in 2020 are higher than earlier. Besides, 86% agree customers are now more informed. (HubSpot, 2020)"

What Makes an Effective Service Desk System? 

An effective service desk is all about a well-built and functioning platform that automatically tracks and manages user requests uninterruptedly. It hardly takes time to resolve customer queries and concerns. Using infused automation tools, the service desk system gathers customer tickets from different channels, arranges them in a queue on a priority basis, and passes them to human agents for professional intervention. 

This can be identified with the following qualities: 

1. Easy and quick to use 

2. Ever accessible 

3. Easy to integrate with existing apps and tools 

4. Includes technical support and training 

5. Meets user expectations 

6. Reasonably priced 

“Statistical Insight: The ITIL framework is used in 86 percent of service desks. However, there is a rise in the use of DevOps (11%) and ISO/IEC 20000 (29%) in recent times (SDI).” 

10 Must-Haves to Make Service Desk Management Successful in 2021

Gartner survey conducted on 2nd April 2020 confirmed that major ITSM tools and products will help AITSM with the quality data it requires to learn from, predict and respond. Let’s not delay further in exploring 10 exclusive features that would make your IT service desk more effective this year and in the upcoming ones. 

1. Insightful Dashboard - Any service desk system your enterprise uses should have an insightful dashboard to ensure employees' ease of login, navigation and save them from hassle as well as errors. 

2. Automatic Ticket Building - Your IT service desk should be able to raise tickets from employee requests automatically. This will add pace to the process of delivering them support. 

3. New ticket alerts - It's better not to lose a single employee ticket that may result in severe dissatisfaction. So go for a service desk system that immediately notifies the team whenever a new ticket shows up. 

4. Merging and grouping of tickets - It is necessary to track and work on a common problem faced by many employees in your organization. So, make sure that your service desk can merge and group employee tickets based on their service history. 

5. Support team’s mail integration - There is no point in wasting time on locating and referring employee requests in the inbox of different team members. That’s the reason why you need an IT service desk that can integrate the emails of all support members and allow them to attend to requests from the ticket itself.

6. Creating & saving notes on employee tickets - Sometimes, the need may arise to refer to an old ticket. To facilitate this, your IT service desk must create and store notes on tickets that are already addressed. It makes way for knowledge sharing and weaknesses among support team members. 

7. Managing tasks based on location & job role- You can’t afford your support team not able to decide and not performing up-to-the-mark in resolving the tickets. Rather, you need a service desk that is empowered to assign, sort, and manage tickets based on employee location and needs. 

8. Follow ticket history and interactions - You should consider having an IT service desk recording and chasing the history of tickets to find out what interactions have taken place regarding each and which mistakes have been made. It helps you prevent such mistakes in the future. 

9. Reporting on demand - You always need to gather data on certain things like the number of inbound tickets, resolution rate, time, and more. All these exclusive details should be covered in a report format and produced by the service desk on demand. This will help you make informed decisions and boost the performance of your support team. 

10. Data storage and security - Your employee’s queries should not leak out or he/she may feel betrayed. So, your ultimate priority should be to use the IT service desk that comes with safe data storage. It will improve the employee’s trust in you and encourage them to work with you for the long term. 

“Statistical Insight: Organizations concentrating on customer experience have a 3 times greater return than CX slackers. (BARE International, 2020)” 

Conclusion 

Employee support is crucial for your company’s growth and success. If it turns out to be poor, then employees are not going to stay with you for a longer period. You should continue embracing every means of effective service desk management in 2021. Just consider having all the above features in your service desk system and it will start to deliver an excellent employee experience within no time. 

Do you agree or not? Rezolve.ai is available with its conversational AI-based platform and products to guide you through the process of amazing employee support. Keep in touch with our AI leaders and ask for a demo right now!!