WHAT IS HELPDESK?
The irony within a successful organisation is that – the bigger and better it becomes - the more every-day I.T. niggles and headaches start emerging, like ants. Every day. Someone has to deal with these issues, as if they aren’t resolved, the productivity of the business becomes affected.
As a result, usually either a Director, or someone already doing I.T. work within the organisation is charged with or volunteers to take care of these issues. Very quickly they can turn into a daily pile-up, increasingly strangling his or her working days. Hampering, and partially or totally neutralising their benefit to the Organisation where they could be utilised far more effectively in projects profitable to the Organisation.
An external Help Desk is the answer to immediately solving this common issue. It is a single point of contact which provides information and assistance to its clients, usually troubleshooting problems that the clients staff are having with computers or similar/linked peripheral products. A sophisticated Help Desk offering is computerised and uses a software product which enables it to manage a large amount of daily calls through a tracking system.
Generally a Help Desk will have different levels. Level One is generally the first point of contact, where staff of an Organisation phone the Help Desk and can (in many instances) be talked through steps needed to resolve the issue.
Level 2 is usually an escalation point if Level 1 cannot immediately resolve an issue, and may require some desktop assistance (i.e. the HelpDesk professional accessing the Organisations network to investigate the issue). Level 3 is where the issue isn’t readily solved, and the problem is then escalated to an expert who can assess the problem in detail.
WHY SHOULD YOU CONSIDER HELPDESK?
If you are a business owner and you are finding that you are spending too much time focusing on day-to-day I.T. issues, distracting you from your core business – then a third party Help Desk is exactly what you require to make sure your IT is running smoothly enabling you to apply your skills and resource to growing the business and making profit!
If you are running a bigger Organisation and you already have someone as an internal resource for I.T. – but they are increasingly bogged down with a multitude of mundane staff I.T. issues (rather than projects which enhance the I.T. network and drive greater cost savings or productivity for the business) – HelpDesk support to free up that resource also makes perfect sense.
The benefits of a HelpDesk don’t stop there. Research has shown that the real value of an external Help Desk is not just the ‘reactive’ day-to-day problem-solving, but in the cumulative benefit of daily communication with a multitude of your employees and/or your customers. The HelpDesk team monitors and gathers information showing patterns of technical problems, usage, staff preferences and satisfaction.
