learn More about the 7 Habits of Highly Successful Help Desks -- Plan Ahead & Institute a Structured Workflow -- Know Your IT Environment -- Simplify & Automate Your Help Desk Tasks -- Communicate with Your End-Users -- Help Your Customers Help Themselves -- Monitor the Performance of Your Support Staff -- Survey Your Customers

1. 7 Habits of Highly
Successful Help Desks
IT Help Desk Simplified…!!
© 2013, SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.
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2. Agenda
» Your Help Desk Needs Help! Do you Know that?
» 7 Habits of Highly Successful Help Desks
1. Plan Ahead & Institute a Structured Workflow
2. Know Your IT Environment
3. Simplify & Automate Your Help Desk Tasks
4. Communicate with Your End-Users
5. Help Your Customers Help Themselves
6. Monitor the Performance of Your Support Staff
7. Survey Your Customers
» The Right Way, The Efficient Way
» Learn How SolarWinds Web Help Desk Can Help!
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL HELP DESKS
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3. Your Help Desk Needs Help! Do you Know that?
You have IT technicians Is this enough for good
You run a Help Desk
Resolving Tickets help desk service?
Tickets are Growing Types & Complexities of Are you prepared to
in Number tickets are increasing meet these challenges?
Consistently Meet Improving Customer How will you
Customer SLA Service accomplish this?
» What you need is NOT more help desk staff, but rather some wise counsel to
help you plan, optimize, and execute your help desk services smartly and
effectively.
» Let’s take a look at some best practices…
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL HELP DESKS
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4. 7 Habits of Highly
Successful Help Desks
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL HELP DESKS
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5. Plan Ahead & Institute a Structured
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Workflow
» This is the most fundamental step for the success of any help desk
implementation.
» You need to know the ins and outs of your help desk strategy. So,
start by planning a structured workflow of:
 How you intend to assign a technician to a ticket
 How the ticket is going to be escalated
 How the communication with the end-user is going to be established
 How the ticket approval process is going to be
» You need to define reasonable service level agreements,
appropriate support levels, and good business logic for ticket
routing and assignment.
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL HELP DESKS
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6. Know Your IT Environment 2
» You need to know your IT environment, your end-users and their
designated assets, because they are the source of your IT tickets.
» You need to have quick access to details of user accounts, as well
as your enterprise hardware and software equipment.
» Start by:
 Integrating your help desk solution with your corporate Active
Directory®
 Importing all your assets and IT inventory into your help desk
software
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL HELP DESKS
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7. Simplify & Automate Your Help Desk Tasks 3
» So many help desk activities are done manually by support
staff.
 This costs time, effort, and leaves room for human error.
» Employ automation techniques for:
 Simplifying ticket creation
 Ticket assignment, routing, and escalation
 Performing specific ticketing actions for predefined event
conditions
 Alerting and notification on closing or breached SLAs
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL HELP DESKS
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8. Communicate with Your End-Users 4
» Your customers NEED TO KNOW the status and progress of their help
desk ticket at any given point.
» Prompt communication contributes to improved customer satisfaction
and involves keeping your customer updated on:
 Initial ticket acknowledgement
 Technician assignment
 Expected turnaround (based on SLAs)
 Course of resolution or remediation steps
 Escalation and approvals
 Notification or query back to the customer
 Ticket resolution and closure
» Your help desk software could serve as an effective medium of easy
information exchange between the support staff and the end-user.
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL HELP DESKS
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9. Help Your Customers Help Themselves 5
» There are many issues your customers can resolve
themselves when provided with the right self-service
resources.
 Build an easily searchable knowledge base to provide both
your customers and technicians quick resolutions to frequently
encountered problems.
 You can provide FAQs and technical tips to address specific
issues, and also tag them to align with specific ticket fields that
point the user to the associated KB article when those fields are
populated by the user.
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL HELP DESKS
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10. Monitor the Performance of
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Your Support Staff
» You should consider monitoring and analyzing the
performance of your help desk technicians over time.
» This will help you measure the team’s service levels and
workload management, and isolate critical issues requiring
more support resources.
» Scheduled, ongoing performance reports will help to
provide additional insight.
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11. Survey Your Customers 7
» Do you know how satisfied your end-users are? At the end of
the day, it’s customer satisfaction that defines the success of
your help desk service.
» Surveying your customers on a regular basis will help you get
 Better understanding of your technician’s performance
 Potential bottlenecks in workflow
 Root causes of repeating issues
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL HELP DESKS
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12. The Right Way, The Efficient Way
» Running a help desk can be a cinch when you do things the
right way— the efficient way —using the right tools to
simplify your complex ticketing tasks.
» This will buy you back some much-needed time and make
you look like an IT superstar in front of your happy customers
(not to mention your boss).
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL HELP DESKS
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13. Learn How SolarWinds
Web Help Desk Can Help..!!
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL HELP DESKS
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14. Simple & Easy-to-use Help Desk Software
» SolarWinds Web Help Desk offers affordable yet powerful IT help desk
ticketing software with simplicity and automation to help you quickly
resolve problems, escalate issues, and isolate root causes.
» With built-in reporting tools to customize, schedule, export, and email
reports, Web Help Desk gives you complete control of your ticketing
process.
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL HELP DESKS
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15. How Web Help Desk Helps You…
» Email-to-Ticket Automation – Emails and file attachments sent to your
help desk email inbox will be automatically converted into a ticket.
» Ticket Action Rules – Automatically assign a ticket at any stage in its life to
the individual IT tech or group with easy-to-configure cascading rules using
granular or general criteria as defined by your needs.
» Asset Management – Manage client assignments, build parent/child
relationships between assets, and integrate with your favorite asset
discovery software for instant accessibility within your help desk
application.
» Built-in Knowledge Base – External knowledge bases empower your users
to easily find important information for self-resolution, while internal
knowledge bases conveniently centralize FAQs and tech tips.
» Built-In Performance Reporting – Get direct insight into technician
performance, areas for improvement in customer service, real-time billing
data, and bottleneck problems.
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL HELP DESKS
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16. Web Help Desk Ticketing Dashboard
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL HELP DESKS
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17. Web Help Desk Ticket Details
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL HELP DESKS
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18. Web Help Desk Client Login
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL HELP DESKS
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19. Web Help Desk Change Management &
Approval Workflow
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL HELP DESKS
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20. Web Help Desk Free 30-day FREE TRIAL
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL HELP DESKS
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21. Thank You!
Easy Help Desk Software & Simplified Ticketing =
Happy Help Desk Staff & Happy Customers
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