As IT’s responsibilities continue to increase, many service desk technicians are still tied up with familiar incidents. The specific issues might change over time, but the repetitive ticket is a frustration as old as business technology. This blog will address seven common IT issues and how to bring faster resolutions to the employee.
Password Reset
How many passwords do employees in your organization need to remember? What’s the criteria for each one?
- At least eight characters
- One uppercase letter
- One number
- One symbol
“Did I use my dog’s name or my cat’s name? Was my daughter already born when I created this password? Would I have capitalized her name?”
Trying to remember these passwords can take up valuable time and cause an employee to grow frustrated. Often, a reset request will wind up in a service technician’s queue.
An
automated password recovery process in the
service desk can be useful in this case. The employee simply fills in the required information in the service catalog’s request form, and the service desk can automatically reply with a link to reset.
Application Performance Issues
Whether an employee uses one application or multiple applications in their daily work, it’s important that they’re easily accessible and reliable. But sometimes those applications may run slower than usual.
A modern service portal should offer
live chat. After all, today’s employees expect the same convenient service in the workplace that they experience as consumers. With live chat, agents can capture details of an issue that might not be provided up front when an employee submits a ticket.
If the issue evolves into a problem, those details can be incredibly handy when it comes to discovering the root of the problem. Agents can also more easily communicate to other relevant team members that they’ve identified the problem and are working to get it fixed.
Inability to Access Email
Email is still a prominent source of communication in the business. It’s how employees send pertinent information to others in the same building, several miles away, or across the globe.
Email server outages can strike at any time and affect the entire business. Most organizations use network monitoring software to identify server issues. When that software
triggers alerts, an integrated service desk can automatically generate an incident prior to the influx of tickets from impacted employees, allowing IT pros to get a jumpstart on addressing the outage.
Already one step ahead, the service desk can post a message on the service portal, alerting employees that they’re working on the issue. On the backend, techs can also link all incoming incidents to a problem record, streamlining the resolution for all of those tickets at once.
Headset Issues
Let’s say you’re working remotely because of travel. You have everything you need for your upcoming meeting: a charged laptop, presentation slides, a working camera, and your headset. But coincidentally, your wireless headset won’t connect.
For these types of incidents, it doesn’t help to submit a ticket and wait for a response. This meeting presentation is happening
now. So how can IT connect these employees with solutions quickly?
AI-powered self-service is a great option for urgent break/fix incidents. Employees just need to type “headset” into the search bar to locate the knowledge articles most commonly associated with that type of issue. The key to powerful smart suggestions is continued use and data.
The longer the
knowledge base is used, the “smarter” it is because it tracks issues common to the system, resulting in much faster resolution times. If all else fails, this is another chance for
live chat to shine by giving employees instant access (well...almost instant) to a support agent.
Computer Freezing
Raise your hand if your computer has ever run slowly or frozen completely. Everyone reading this? Sounds about right. The cause of this familiar headache could range from the types of applications installed to drivers needing to be updated or replaced to the machine being dated. Of course, without a working computer, it can be difficult to complete daily tasks.
With
remote control capabilities in the service desk, a service tech can guide the employee to recovery. The tech can launch a session by
remotely gaining access to the employee’s machine and diagnose the issue in real time. From this session, an incident record can be created to track changes that have been made, which makes future resolutions easier if similar issues arise.
Service management can also help address any systemic issues with the individual laptop or even the type of laptop. Complete incident records attached to the asset can help IT prioritize a replacement. Continued issues with a certain model of device can help drive purchasing decisions, but IT will only have that data through documentation and ITSM best practices.
VoIP Connectivity
Many businesses have moved from using telephones to using cloud-based Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) or softphones. Examples of these phones include Dialpad, Jabber, and RingCentral. One of the most frequent issues employees run into with these applications is dysfunctional audio.
Knowledge bases can guide employees to specific articles to help troubleshoot and solve their own issues. These articles may suggest adjusting audio settings or provide steps for reinstalling the application. Whatever the solution, a well-built knowledge base can help save technicians time and energy, and put an end to repetitive tickets.
Teleconferencing Issues
Today’s employees are working from anywhere, so they need to be able to connect with colleagues in and out of the office through internal chat services, softphones, and teleconferencing.
This powerful and convenient technology is great—but it isn’t invincible. When scheduling teleconference meetings, employees might experience integration and plugin issues. Calendars from one application may not automatically sync to the calendar in another. Valuable minutes (or longer) can be lost while trying to get connected. Audio may be staticy, screen sharing may not work, and so on.
This is another area where an AI-powered knowledge base shines serving up solutions articles for DIY employees or providing techs with one-click solutions. If there’s a pattern in the ticketing log, IT support might spot a trend with a particular application, leading them to explore other teleconferencing options that help alleviate disruptions to employee productivity.
Every organization deals with repetitive technology issues, but with a versatile
ITSM solution, those issues can be resolved efficiently for both the service technician and employee.
