We also leverage the power of customer feedback to improve our services. According to a Service Desk Benchmarking Report, 79% of the respondents used customer feedback to improve services, and so do we.
So, if you want to learn more about Q4 Gems, the practices we follow, and the metrics we measure, you have come to the right place. Here is everything you need to know about our IT service desk solutions.
IT Service Desk: A Brief Overview
An IT service desk, or an IT help desk, is a central point of contact within an organization that provides end users with information technology (IT) support and assistance. It is a critical component of an organization’s IT infrastructure and serves as a communication hub between IT personnel and employees or customers who need technical help or have IT-related issues.
If you are running a business and have outsourced your IT services, their service desk will provide you with the help you need to resolve your issues. The primary aim of a service desk is to provide high-quality services to customers on time.
Here are some core responsibilities and functions of an IT service desk:
- Incident Management: Recording, categorizing, prioritizing, and resolving incidents reported by users. Incidents may include hardware or software issues, system errors, or other IT-related problems.
- Service Request Management: Handling and fulfilling user service requests, such as software installations, access permissions, or password resets.
- Communication and User Support: Providing timely updates to users on the progress of their reported issues and offering technical support and guidance.
- Knowledge Management: Creating and maintaining a knowledge base with troubleshooting guides, FAQs, and solutions to common IT issues for quicker problem resolution.
- And much more
Such services will offer through various channels, such as phone, live chat, email, and more. Your IT provider will let you know what channels they use.
Best Practices For IT Service Desk Management
There are many practices that IT service desk management follows to ensure timely resolution of issues, proper workflows, and more. There are four groups these practices are categorized into to ensure you receive the best service.
Here are the four categories our IT service desk Canada service is categorized into for your ease and convenience:
Practices To Follow For Better Productivity
Every business needs positive outcomes; an IT service desk can help you get there with the right practices. We can help ensure high levels of productivity for your business with the following practices:
Customizing Tools
Any tool you select from our full range of services, we will customize it according to the needs of your business. For example, if you select Google Workspace, Office 365, or any other tool, we will ensure its customization for better workflows and communication. Such customization will ensure higher productivity for your employees, so you never have to worry about work again.
Allocating Tasks And Tickets
Q4 Gems make sure that their technicians are assigned tasks and tickets after considering the workload they already have. Doing this guarantees efficiency so that we can offer you the best help and services whenever you need them. We have features that ensure the workload of every technician is managed efficiently.
Adequate Training
IT service desk professionals, even managers, require adequate training so everyone understands what is happening. Because of this, we can handle all of your queries with ease. Such a mindset helps us have an extra pair of hands when there is a ticket flood.
Practices For Better Optimization
Streamlining IT service desk Canada ensures users have an optimized experience. It also guarantees you can deliver your products or services in the best way possible. Here are some practices we follow for better optimization to help you streamline processes:
Leveraging Workflows
One thing we always avoid is a queue of tickets because it hampers our average time to resolve your issues. This is why we have automation features to leverage workflows to handle recurring tickets easily. Our workflows have predetermined solutions to common issues to close tickets and resolve your issues as soon as possible.
Ticket Owners
Our IT service desk Canada professionals ensure every ticket has an owner for accountability. We can maintain an average time when we can resolve the ticket in time. Every ticket is assigned an owner to perform assignments and resolve your matter quickly.
Practices For Knowledge Management
Knowledge management allows our professionals to remain effective and avoid long ticket queues. Here are some of the top practices we follow to guarantee effective knowledge management:
Knowledge Creation
Our practices involve our technicians actively participating in creating knowledgeable guides to have solutions to common issues. Such a mindset instills a vast knowledge base among the technicians to resolve your issues quickly. Whatever issue your business has, they will resolve it in no time.
Knowledge Accessibility
Knowledge creation is incomplete without knowledge accessibility. The knowledge our technicians create is available to everyone on the team so everyone can easily search for the solution to your problems and provide you with an answer. When your business opts for our IT service desk Canada, you can count on your queries being resolved as soon as possible.
Practices For Metrics Management
Metrics are important because they help you quantify and manage your efforts and outcomes. When you have the right metrics, you can go in the direction you need to offer a better service. This is why our service has various metrics we follow.
Here are some of the top practices we follow for better metrics management:
Subjective And Objective Metric Measures
We use both objective and subjective measures to ensure the efficiency of our IT service desk. For example, we use metrics such as average resolution times, sentiment analysis, and more to provide us with both measures. It gives us a complete picture of our IT service desk to improve our services for better resolution of issues.
Consistency With Metric Measurement
Consistent measurements allow us to have a full picture and help identify problems with the system. It also provides a glimpse into the issues that might take place in the future. So we can take preventive measures to resolve issues as soon as possible.
The Most Important IT Service Desk Metrics To Measure In 2023
By now, you know the most effective practices our IT service desk Canada follows to ensure the efficiency of your business. All of this is possible with the right metrics that allow us to measure our productivity and efficiency.
Let’s take a deep dive into the various metrics we measure daily to provide an impeccable service:
Average Time For Resolving Tickets
One of the most important metrics our IT service desk Canada measures is the average time it takes to resolve tickets. It helps us plan how we will resolve your issues and the number of technicians we require to reduce our average time of resolving issues.
We follow some best practices that help us with providing an effective service. These include the following:
- Automation: Automating manual activities allows us to reduce the time of assigning tickets manually
- Analyzing service request patterns: It helps us build a wide knowledge base to resolve common problems
- Tagging and categorizing tickets: Categorization of similar tickets reduces the time that goes to waste when multiple technicians resolve the same issues
- Prioritization of tickets: This allows us to decrease any incorrect ticket assignments
When we have a summary of the time it takes to resolve your issues, we can divide the time taken by the number of tickets. This helps with planning and designing service-level agreements, so you know what to expect when you opt for Q4 Gems as your IT service provider.
Ticket Volume Trend
The ticket volume trend is the total number of tickets that come to us within a certain time frame. We use visual data to highlight the number of tickets we receive within a specified time. We measure this metric because of various reasons, which include the following:
- Handling ticket load: An analysis of monthly volume of tickets allows our managers to optimize service requests and effectively handle the ticket load
- Actionable for managers: Our service desk managers can identify peak loads for better resource management, identify training needs, create a talent pool, and increase bench strength after analyzing this metric
Once our IT service desk Canada handles the ticket load effectively, we can guarantee you get our best services. Our state-of-the-art technology helps us have these metrics to ensure effective services.
Downtime
There are times when servers need to go down, and this is when critical IT services are unavailable to clients. We try our best to reduce the downtime as much as possible. The primary aim behind reducing downtime is to guarantee that you don’t lose important business because of the unavailability of IT services.
It also helps our managers determine whether we are delivering the level of services we promised to our clients as defined by our SLA. We also prepare our team to analyze past outages and anticipate future ones to effectively handle all your service desk issues and resolve them as soon as possible.
Number Of Tickets Resolved On The First Call
Our technicians resolve all tickets as soon as possible on the first call. Doing this lets us handle the ticket load effectively and provide support immediately. Our managers measure this metric to ensure service desk efficiency across the level of support our technicians offer.
Here are some practices we follow to guarantee that all your tickets are resolved on the first call:
- We analyze request patterns for a wide knowledge base to resolve the most common issues
- If we don’t resolve issues within the first call, then we need to offer training and upgrade technician’s skills
- Our workflow automation allows us to route tickets to the right group or technician automatically
We have kept these practices for a long time with our IT service desk Canada to ensure you receive the level of support you have been promised from our technicians. Our managers also create detailed forms to collect all the required information to resolve your tickets as soon as possible.
Cost Per Ticket
IT services have operating costs that come with running a support service. We measure the cost per ticket by dividing the operating cost by the total number of tickets we receive within a certain period. The reason for measuring it is to check the cost we incur per ticket, which we require for budgeting our expenses.
Our service desk managers can utilize this information to create a wide knowledge base, assign tickets to the correct technician, and identify any knowledge or training gaps. All of these practices help us keep our costs in control to guarantee we can offer you a great service without passing on the cost to you.
Final Thoughts
If you want to opt for our IT service desk Canada, we recommend that you contact us for an initial consultation to discuss your IT needs. We will help resolve your issues quickly and provide an IT framework for your needed services. For more information on our wide range of services, contact us as soon as possible.
