How to Improve Your IT Support Desk Performance

Your IT support desk is arguably one of the most important aspects of your entire business. It can make or break both the product and the customer’s experience with the product. And no matter how well you feel like your support desk is doing, there’s always room for improvement.

Don’t Downplay Your IT Help Desk Support

Organizations spend thousands of dollars – often five or six figures worth annually – on promoting their brands and creating positive associations in the marketplace. Yet, when it comes to customer support – the very first point of contact a new customer has – they fail to invest the proper resources.

Are you in a similar situation?

If you aren’t careful, you can view your IT help desk as a secondary investment. In other words, you see it as a nice component of your business, but it’s not essential. The sooner you reject this flawed perspective, the better.

The truth is that your IT help desk has a major impact on both a customer's first impression and their long-term relationship with your business. By giving it the focus it deserves, you’ll enjoy benefits like:

• Greater efficiency. You don’t want customers to get stuck at the help desk. Not only does it tie up resources, but it fosters palpable frustration for all parties involved. By improving your help desk support, the process becomes much smoother and more efficient.

• Better engagement. Many companies have passive IT help desks that provide hands-off support. And while there are situations where this automated approach works, they’re few and far between. Your customers really want to speak with a person. When you improve your strategy, it naturally leads to better engagement and a more human touch.

• Smoother lifecycle. Most organizations pour so much of their energy into onboarding a customer that they forget to invest the same resources into the remainder of the customer lifecycle. (This often plays out in the form of poor support.) A revamped strategy ensures you don’t drop the ball in these latter stages.

• Stronger loyalty. When it’s all said and done, improved IT help desk support promotes a higher degree of customer loyalty. And when you consider that 80 percent of your future profits will come from just 20 percent of your existing customers, the value in treating them well becomes crystal clear.

When you understand how deep the impact of your IT help desk is, you’ll have no trouble channeling your focus into this area. In fact, you may be inclined to reallocate assets to this area of your business.

4 Tips for Better Support

Improving your help desk support doesn’t have to be as costly of an endeavor as you imagine. Here are a few simple tweaks you can make to generate results:

1. Collect Better Data

It’s one thing to know you need improvement. It’s something else entirely to know how and where to improve. Your intuition might tell you one thing, but it’s ultimately the data that matters. The question is, are you collecting the right data to make informed decisions?

Piecemealing data together is a dangerous and ineffective practice. To get a better feel for how your customers feel and the progress that needs to be made to improve your support efforts, we recommend gathering both quantitative and qualitative feedback through product analytics.

Product analytics shows you how to scale customer empathy by understanding how they interact with your products. It’s basically the process of using data to track their behavior and create a digital trace of who they are and how you can best serve them.

1. Standardize Everything

If there’s one area of your business where it pays to be rigid, it’s your help desk. You want to standardize as much of the process as you possibly can in an effort to provide a consistent experience for each customer. This starts with hiring the right people and extends into how you architect and document your processes. Be as meticulous as you can!

1. Motivate Your Team

Preparing your team to succeed with standardized processes and proper training is important. But it’s also critically important that you motivate your team to succeed. And contrary to what most business leaders think, money is not the ideal motivator.

Though money can provide a short-term boost, it’s just one aspect of the equation. You can accelerate your results by gamifying the process and creating challenges where employees can compete with one another for prizes (like time off, awards, and other non-monetary bonuses).

1. Improve Onboarding

If your IT help desk is overloaded with support tickets and requests, it’s a sign that you’re doing one of two things wrong (or possibly both). The first possibility is that your product is poor. The second possibility is that you’re doing a poor job of onboarding your customers.

Most businesses are so laser-focused on the first factor that poor onboarding typically goes undetected. Unfortunately, it’s just as important. When customers don’t have the proper expectations on the front end, they’re much more likely to experience problems on the back end. (Hence the reason your help desk is overwhelmed.)

Though it requires a bit more labor-intensive onboarding process, conducting more customer research during the sales process will produce a customer who has more appropriate expectations.

The Pursuit of Incremental Gains

When it comes to a monumental challenge like totally revamping your IT help desk, it’s easy to become overwhelmed at the prospect of creating significant change. But do you want to know the good news? You don’t have to.

If you study the most successful organizations in the world and look at their IT help desk support, you’ll find that many of them have experienced a similar metamorphosis from “below average” to “exceptional.” And in almost every case, they did so by focusing on incremental gains.

You might feel the pressure to make a dramatic change, but that’s not realistic or necessary. The better and more sustainable option is to focus on something productivity expert James Clear calls “tiny gains.”

If you improve a process (or entire department) by one percent each day for an entire year, you’ll actually end up 37-times better off than you were at the start of that year. In other words, you don’t need to change everything right away. Start small and blaze a new path forward. That’s how you make significant progress.