Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Help desk leadership is always an ongoing topic. People can’t seem to feel they know enough about it, so they keep digging, looking for new ideas, perspectives, methods, or whatever can make them even better at their jobs. And don’t get us wrong; that’s exactly what you should be doing! And to help you with that, we discussed “Service and Leadership in 2023” in April’s Ticket Volume podcast live recording.

Suddenly you have a spike in Ticket Volume, but you didn’t see it coming? Don't panic! The first step to effectively manage any help desk is to measure this service desk metric. Organizations want to provide the best possible support to their customers. Several metrics can help them analyze trends, forecast future demand, and optimize support team resources to provide better service. Understanding metrics leads to data-driven decisions.

Ticket triage is a central process of all service desks: when something goes wrong, it must be solved. It is at the heart of every support team's work and is related to what ITIL describes as Incident Management. Well implemented, triage can save time and help deliver consistent IT services, which is a main goal of all high-performing organizations. Complete service desk solutions include different features, such as automation, to triage support tickets simply and quickly.

If you can harness the power of intelligent workflow automation, it has the potential to transform your operations and enable you to deliver on customer expectations. StartingPoint can provide your team with the necessary tools to embrace intelligent workflow automation. Before breaking down this platform, let’s take a step back and define what intelligent workflow automation is.

If you can harness the right solutions, automation can play a powerful role in elevating your workflows and enabling your business to reach new heights. Rather than embracing a wide range of different solutions, it’s often best to keep your technology stack small and nimble. Using too many automation tools can result in convoluted workflows. ‍

In customer service, a business’s promises only add value when they are guaranteed in writing. Customers want to know that quality and timely service is guaranteed, and that they have specific recourse if things don’t go as planned. Service level agreements (SLAs) designate contracts between a service provider and their clients that define the service provided, as well as the timeframe and delivery method.

We hear a lot about gamification in IT, but it can sometimes be unclear how to implement it, its benefits and challenges, and which tools are indispensable to succeed. Keeping agents motivated can be a struggle in itself, we know. Staff demotivation is not uncommon due to multiple factors – such as end-user complaints, burnout because of constant incoming incidents, and the monotony of some service desk tasks – and can lead to high agent turnover.

In the same way that a CRM and an ITSM tool are not equal, help desk and customer service fulfill different roles and therefore have different requirements. Customer service is about Customer Experience (CX), whereas help desks are more technology focused. Additionally, both functions have different toolset requirements.