As an IT professional, you probably routinely witness new employees settle into their new role with a plethora of devices and software applications to get acquainted with. Everything is going great until a week passes, and… an Outlook outage brings the entire office to a screeching halt.
A vast majority of IT support requests employees submit can be linked to hardware or
software assets. To resolve a ticket, it may be as easy as reminding employees of your company’s new network password. Other times it’s more complicated than that.
Employees sometimes take for granted the speed and accuracy with which your IT team is able to come to the rescue. Providing services is one thing, but it’s hard to imagine how difficult it would be to work tickets without technology asset data available. This data is crucial to helping ensure tickets are resolved as quickly as possible.
IT asset management (ITAM) helps make these experiences in the office as smooth as possible. Here are some of the biggest impacts asset data has on the services you provide employees.
Save Time For Service Desk Agents and Employees
Employees throughout your organization may not be readily armed with details that are essential for your team. After all, they’re not—nor should they be expected to be—experts on OS versions or device manufactured dates. However, these data points are critical to troubleshoot issues but not always easy for employees to find.
Luckily for everyone involved, with an ITAM solution in place your team isn’t left guessing with limited, incomplete, or incorrect information. Imagine the time that could be saved by reducing back-and-forth communications just to get the serial number from a device in question.
So, how do you gather this data and keep it continually updated? Fortunately, there are several
IT asset discovery methods available at your disposal that can work behind the scenes to provide this data automatically.
Visibility into the Lifecycle of Assets for Better Decision Making
When it comes to hardware and software,
IT asset lifecycle management is a key component to keeping everything operational and establishing an optimal experience with devices used every day.
Lifecycle management can help your IT team make important decisions, whether that be deciding to decommission problematic devices or taking action to extend the life of others. These decisions can be made easier thanks to a number of data points, including:
- Warranty information
- Previously submitted tickets related to the device
- A history of employees who have owned the device
- Any previous upgrades
A simple example is having visibility into the warranty status of each device in the event an employee submits a ticket regarding a malfunction. This can help save money and avoid costly replacements that may be made without knowing what replacements may be covered under warranty.
Resolve Tickets Faster
Employees prefer a timely resolution to tickets submitted, which can put pressure on your team to provide solutions quickly. IT asset management is a key component to your employee service strategy because it can help reduce the time it takes to correctly diagnose an issue.
Finding a serial number or even a model number can take time if you don’t have any idea of what the hardware specs of an employee’s device are.
These data points can also be difficult to find even if a technician attempts to locate this information manually, which is why it’s so important to have this information available on-demand to quickly reference whenever an employee submits a ticket.
Efficiently Handle Dreaded Outages
You probably deal with troubleshooting outages in the workplace every now and then, but do you ever stop to think about what goes into resolving these issues? Let’s say your organization is dealing with an Outlook outage. When employees begin submitting tickets, a modern service desk that utilizes asset data can make it easier to identify the issue and get the office up and running again.
With the help of artificial intelligence, these incidents can be identified as related to the same outage and merged to create a problem record. From there, the root cause of the problem can be traced to a technology asset within your organization, along with which employees are impacted.
Using asset data to pinpoint the cause of disruption from the start, and then centralizing team members to work on resolving the problem can be a huge time saver for the service desk. The last thing you want is six people working on the same issue independently whenever an outage occurs.
By establishing this relationship between your company’s technology assets and impacted users, you can notify impacted employees and set expectations for a resolution.
Minimize Disruption Whenever Changes are Made
Application and software updates are one of the necessary inconveniences employees face at times. Implementing these changes simply wouldn’t be possible without a complete picture of IT assets and how they affect the entire organization.
To help reduce the potential headaches of unexpected changes, your tech team can use the data it has on hand to identify what devices or applications linked to a change record are likely to impact employees or departments. When a change is scheduled to roll out on a given day, it gives employees a heads up of what’s happening, when, and how long it is expected to take so they can plan accordingly.
Sticking with the Outlook outage example, perhaps a change needs to be implemented to prevent future disruption. Status updates are a great way to add visibility to employees regarding changes and the assets impacted.
Ready to Improve the Service Experience for Employees?
It’s hard to imagine what it would be like if these tickets went into a black hole, without knowing what’s going on or how to respond. Luckily when situations like this occur, it’s easy to get to the bottom of things when you know what devices and people are affected thanks to having IT asset management capabilities inside the service desk.
Are you ready to launch an employee-focused service management strategy? Check out our webinar
How to Align Your Service Desk With Digital Transformation for ideas on where to begin.
