Is A Lack of Documentation Breaking Your Help Desk Support?

How A Documented Process can Make Or Break Your Help Desk Support

If your help desk is slow, or inefficient in handling calls, tickets or problems of any kind it’s likely a result of poor documentation. I understand that documentation takes effort and planning (this may mean completely changing the way your IT team approaches supporting your users!), but if they aren’t documenting problems and procedures to fix user issues, you’re likely wasting time and money.

What you’ll be wasting with a help desk that doesn’t document isn’t trivial:

Wasted Time—while your IT workers will be slower to respond to problems without having a well laid out and documented process to resolve issues, your users are wasting time not being able to complete their work (Note: this is time that is likely costing you hundreds to thousands of hours annually!).

Wasted Budget—with tighter budgets and less room for waste, your business needs to keep inefficient IT practices to a minimum. Your business can’t handle added costs inhibiting your team’s productivity and subsequent lost man hours from unresolved technical issues.

Where does documentation matter? Here are some fundamental areas where the right documentation makes all the difference in getting quick resolutions:

• Document their work—your entire help desk team needs to make sure they document issues as they come in. But even more than just documenting the symptoms your users are describing, they should have a process by which they probe for the right symptoms (the reality is that the majority of tech problems present the same symptoms—when a computer is running slow, your help desk needs to differentiate a problem caused by a virus, malfunctioning hardware or an unpatched system).

Your Ideal Help Desk asks the right questions to resolve issues within the first call. If you’re a Zog customer, you have the comfort that over 99.9% of your problems are resolved within the first call!

• Document Common Problems— Believe it or not, the majority of help desk issues can be boiled down to a couple handful of common problems. While many help desks reinvent the wheel for every ticket, a help desk that uses a good documentation process has resolution paths for ALL common problems before your users are calling in with them. They have the experience of both an internal help desk knowledge base and time tested processes to alleviate your users of their issues quickly.

Good Help Desks will have a well-oiled process guaranteeing your ticket to be responded quickly and will be able to resolve most of your user’s problems immediately.

• Document A Ticket Escalation Process— have you ever had the experience where you submitted a ticket to wait hours, days (or even weeks!) for it to get resolved? 98% percent of stalled tickets are a result of a poor ticket escalation process. A good escalation process makes sure that when your problem comes in, a single technician doesn’t work night and day to figure out the problem (Be Aware: most tech people have a hard time saying they can’t solve a problem—we like to see problems resolved from start to finish). As a result, your ticket may be left in a technician’s cue for days until you follow up on the ticket.

What you need is a help desk that addresses ticket escalation promptly. When you call in with a problem, and if by chance a technician cannot immediately figure out the problem, they will send the ticket to someone very experienced (a Tier II or Tier III technician) to solve the issue. Good help desks don’t make you wait for resolution.

Documentation should be an on-going effort— what many help desks don’t realize is that documentation needs to be on-going. Help desks should be optimizing their issue resolution procedures and processes regularly to make sure you are getting rid of your computer headaches as they pop up.

Are you wasting too much time (and subsequently money) waiting around for your help desk to figure out how to solve your computer issues? Contact us TODAY for a help desk health assessment and find out how your help desk could improve!