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3 Key Features Every Service Desk Needs

Modern enterprises must work to ensure their organization is focused on making employees feel heard and valued, and a key way to do this is through strong IT service management. We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating—today’s employees expect a similar service experience in the workplace that they encounter in their daily lives. To keep pace with evolving employee expectations and amid our growing remote work reality, it’s become more critical than ever for businesses to deliver on those expectations. A service desk solution with the following three features can help create a sustainable and scalable environment for solving employee pain points.
  1. Visibility Into Request Status
When an employee submits a service request, they want to know if it’s been received and if it’s being worked on. Having an automatic confirmation message and a portal where employees can check the status of their ticket can help reduce the number of “Just checking on the status of this!” messages your technicians receive. Think of service requests like a package being sent through the mail. When you place an online retail order, you get an email confirmation. Shortly thereafter, you usually get an email letting you know your package has been shipped along with a tracking number. From there, you can watch your package travel from the distribution center all the way to your front door. Service requests should have the same level of visibility for the employees who submit them.
  1. One Platform for Requests
Few things in life are worse than hearing the words “Hey, got a sec?” as you’re on the way back to your desk. Or, in these times of work from home, getting a chat message asking for help with an IT issue. Or getting a phone call or an email instead of a help desk ticket. Employees need an easy-to-use and easy-to-find platform for submitting incidents and service requests. Ideally, this platform should be optimized to handle a range of requests, from simple ones like name change requests to multi-person workflows like laptop replacement requests and all the way to enterprise-scale changes like standing up a whole application platform with load balanced servers, containerized services, and integrated development environment (IDE) software on the back end. Using a unified ITSM platform encourages collaboration, communication, and visibility across the company to streamline service requests and their resolution.
  1. Automation
Low-level, non-critical tasks such as password resets, document retrieval, and access management can and should be automated. Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can help walk users through the steps they need to take or point to a knowledge base of answers to promote self-service. When AI and knowledge base articles solve user problems, employees can get the support and resources they need to get back to work quickly. Automated workflows can be major time-savers for the service desk team as well. The steps for new hires—account creation, permission assignment, hardware assignment, and workspace assignment—tend not to vary too much. An automated workflow will streamline processes and free up your time to work on the most critical tasks. Heightened visibility for employees, a single platform, and automation all add up to a modern service desk solution capable of resolving everyday pain points and ultimately improving the employee experience.
Anne Badalamenti
As the Manager, Marketing at SolarWinds, Anne helps showcase the value of a unified service management strategy and the benefits it can provide to your…
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