5 Best Practices for Providing IT Support to Your Employees

If you look at a bigger percentage of the most successful companies today, you will realize that their IT departments are the backbones that control the flow of information to ensure that expectations are met and operations continue without interruptions.

The IT department holds a special place in the hierarchy of every company. For instance, you are likely going to find that the tasks handled by these departments are not associated with the main operations of the company.

That notwithstanding, these tasks are not independent of other departments. One of the most important tasks handled by the IT department is providing IT support to other departments and all employees in an organization.

Here are some of the best practices for providing IT support to your employees;

 

Have a Single Location for Employees to Submit Tickets and Requests

Not all employees are tech-savvy. Some of your employees might be able to identify issues with your IT solutions and systems and solve them without any help. Others will need help to solve any issues that they might be facing.

So how do they report these issues or make requests to your IT department? They can do this through an elaborate IT service management (ITSM) system that comes with a ticketing solution. They can submit tickets and requests through this system easily.

Apart from providing a single location for employees to submit tickets and requests, this system ensures that your IT personnel can track all the requests and tickets submitted and manage them among different team members. This way, the team will always make sure that they know what to do.

 

Get All Troubleshooting Information From Employees

Sometimes, an employee facing an issue or a challenge with one of your systems might opt to communicate directly with an IT support team member instead of using the ticketing solution. When this happens, you need to make sure that support team members are getting all the relevant information in one email.

For instance, let us assume that employee X is not able to launch Slack. They write an email to IT support team member Y for troubleshooting. Y might then respond by asking X a question like the operating system they are using, to which X replies.

This might go on for a long time, making the entire process tiresome. Instead, support team members should ask all the questions that they need in the first email. This shortens the process of troubleshooting the issues. It also improves your employee experience and saves time.

 

Self-Service Help Options

Your employees do not have to always talk or interact with your IT support team every time they need some help. You need to also provide them with self-service help options such as knowledge bases. This helps them navigate through different issues on their own.

In addition, it is also important in helping them avoid problems in the future and making them feel like a part of the entire system. There are different ways of doing this – you can use text-based solutions, webinars, convert text to speech, or even videos.

You should also include a section that answers most of the common questions or issues faced by the employees. Expected and common IT issues should be addressed in this section. This way, your employees will be able to handle most of their problems on their own.

 

Ask for Feedback and Provide Timeframes

Your IT support team members need a way to evaluate their performance. This helps them identify different loopholes and how to seal them. It also helps them understand the different ways through which they can improve their performance.

After helping an employee solve a problem, IT support team members should ask for feedback to see if there is anything they can do to improve their services. In addition to asking for feedback, they should provide an estimate of the time it is going to take them to fix the issues raised by employees.

Your employees need to know when they will have a certain issue fixed. This allows them to plan or reschedule their tasks and only take care of what they can with the available resources.

 

Always Support Professionalism

A bigger percentage of tasks handled by your IT support team are internal tasks. This means that some of them might be tempted to be casual when responding to requests from your employees.

You need to make sure that your IT support team projects a friendly and professional tone all the time when dealing with other employees. On the other hand, you should also instill professionalism in your employees.

Those working in demanding departments might find themselves getting frustrated and disrespecting the IT staff. This can affect the relationship between them, something that can affect the operations of your business.

Following the best practices discussed above, you will find it easy and efficient for you to provide IT support to your employees.

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