Best Practices for a Slick and Efficient IT Help Desk

    LONDON, ENGLAND, January 26, 2012 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Having the best at the forefront of any business means success and so it stands to reason that the first contact a customer has with your company has to be not only of the highest quality but highest level too. There are still a lot of businesses who do not place enough importance on their IT help desks and therefore don't budget enough resources into them, which is fundamentally a big mistake that will end up costing them money. Customers will soon give up if they think they are getting nowhere and this means losing their valuable business and these days no company can afford to do this.

One of the other common pitfalls that many businesses encounter is during promotional sales or when new products or services are introduced into the business. It is all too often that staff at these times get overloaded with calls from customers who want to know more about them. When this happens the results can be disastrous as customers don't get the answers they are looking for and staff become frustrated. This can lead to situations where staff become less courteous or less responsive to customer calls and customers get annoyed and or impatient.

It all boils down to having in place a solid foundation of help desk practices, and software solutions go a long way to help improve efficiency which in turn means a company will be able to deal with their customers requests and needs much more effectively. However, the way this is set up still has to be well planned and thought through from the employees' point of view as well as the customers.

Organizing information supplied by your help desk is of paramount importance and this means having a clear cut online knowledge data base which is able to cope with most of the concerns a customer might have. This online database has to be really easy to access and it should cut down the number of calls your help desk has to cope with on a daily basis. The key to having an online help database is to give answers to customers clearly and effectively but should in no way replace the contact of the help desk itself should a customer need to talk to someone in order to resolve an issue.

Your help desk staff must have access to this online data base but they should also have a broader knowledge base to access as well, and this includes one that lets them see past responses to customers questions. It goes without saying that the people who staff your help desk have to be the most competent and therefore it is important to monitor how they cope with stressful situations which is often the case when customers call. All good help desk staff know how to work as a team and this is a very important factor as to how customers will perceive the help they get when they contact a help desk.

All staff on help desks need to be kept up to date with everything about the company and this includes any new products or problems that have arisen with existing products for which they will receive customer calls. An ongoing training program is a must in order to keep staff up to scratch and therefore be able to answer any questions a customer might have. One aspect of the training has to be in 'people skills' as this is a major factor on how they reply to what can often be an angry customer on the other end of the line or email.

Help desk tools are an integral part of how your help desk will operate and they certainly help staff keep on top of the situations they are faced with every day. One of the most invaluable ones is an 'escalator' which basically ensures that customers never have to wait too long before their issues are resolved. It is a fine balance of good staff and the best software available that makes an IT help desk work efficiently which means the customers are kept happy and your business continues to be competitive as well as seen as reliable by every one of your clients who needs to contact you with a problem they may need resolving.

ITLab have been going for over eleven years (a long time for an IT company) and during that time have helped hundreds of clients, grown their team to over one hundred people and picked up some fantastic awards along the way too. If you are looking for IT Support in London then look no further.

Website: http://www.itlab.co.uk

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