With Memorial Day right around the corner, customers are preparing their carts for a weekend of online sales and shopping. Unfortunately, the increase in online traffic for holiday sales is ripe with potential for issues. Similar to the glitches and crashes we see during holiday weekends such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the potential of website issues may increase with online traffic during Memorial Day weekend sales. Luckily, there are ways IT pros can prepare for a surge.
1. Make Sure Everyone’s Prepared
The IT team may take on most of the workload during an outage, but this doesn’t mean the rest of the organization won’t be affected and shouldn’t be prepared. Customer service reps are left to deal with the hoard of disgruntled shoppers if anything goes wrong, so a strong approach to communicating with the IT team is necessary.
Using the same platform across the company can help IT teams get visibility into the issues the customer service team is receiving, prioritize critical issues, and avoid duplicate tickets submitted from customer service. Having the right service tools also allows IT pros to keep track of previous issues and resolve incidents faster.
2. Implement Smart Tools
Customer service tools and point-of-sale (POS) systems can be great for front-end employees, but implementing artificial intelligence (AI) tools into the back end can also improve the IT team’s ability to solve issues faster. Smart tools can lead employees to self-service options, allowing them to solve their own issues and lightening the load on the IT team so they can focus on more critical issues.
AI tools can also increase knowledge sharing and create a better process for incoming tickets and incidents by identifying and comparing previous and current issues. This in turn allows for a smoother business process. Tracking issues and having access to historical insights lets IT teams cut down on resolution time and stay ahead of potential outages.
3. Streamline Communication and Improve Visibility
Communication throughout the company during an outage can be a challenge, but having the proper channels of communication through an
ITSM solution portal can help teams stay in touch on high-priority issues and current resolution processes. Establishing this communication before an outage occurs is vital to resolving issues faster or stopping them before they affect customers.
Another way to increase communication between teams is to offer various access points to resources and to the help desk. Allowing users to alert the team of an issue through their desktop or mobile phone can offer quicker communication and may also help them find a resolution on their own through self-service options.
If your service desk integrates with your IT monitoring tools, you can streamline resolutions by automatically creating an incident for certain alert types. This both boosts visibility and enables IT teams to react more quickly if there’s an issue with the network or an application—while helping reduce potentially duplicative efforts.
Finding the right platform and
service desk for IT teams and customer service can help improve resolution time and keep companies prepared for future issues. Strong ITSM solutions help teams resolve outages quickly and avoid downtime, improving the business.
