Remote working isn’t as simple as making employees to pick up their laptops and decamp to their homes and this is frequently something that is not considered until remote working is required.
The Covid-19 emergency has put massive pressure on businesses and caused a radical shift in the way they work almost overnight. Some issues are easy to counter when it comes to working from home. For example, employees should have access to the right devices and hardware , a well-designed working environment, good internet speed and the ability to securely and reliably connect to their company’s network to access the documents and applications they require to do their jobs.
We may be over the first hurdle, with employees now work from home effectively; however, nobody knows what the next stage of lockdown will bring, or how long it will last. Inspite of this uncertainty, businesses must do all they can to keep their remote workforce efficient and productive for as long as they’re away from their desk.
The difficulty with remote working
Employees will always have IT requirements, which, while organization based can easily be met. However, when a whole workforce is home-based (often including the IT staff), additional challenges can occur. This can cause healthy IT support development to become stretched, unproductive and unable to meet everyone’s desires as they battle to cope with both routine and irregular requests.
To meet up these demands, service desk analysts will require relying on their IT service management platform more than ever. By employing the extra assistance of automation and ensure their best practices and support strategy are up to scratch, the team can effectively manage their workload and maintain users happy while this uncertainty succeed.
Coping with the unexpected
Automation can offer a welcome helping hand during times of high pressure for IT service desk staff. When this modern technology is combined with a seamless IT Service Management solution, service requests can be determined accurately and quickly, often before they arrive at the desks of an analyst.
The efficiency of remote IT support can be maximized with an intuitive knowledge management system. It can prompt user to self-serve by providing them suggestions when they are raising a ticket, so they can diagnose and determine their problem without the ticket even being logged, make sure that issues are simple fixes don’t clog the ticket queue. This is an ultimate solution for specific requests (such as password resets), as client goal-oriented through a set of steps are follow that will make them decide it autonomously by getting a standard password reset workflow and apply automation.
Adopting a ‘shift left’ advance by bringing a declaration much closer to the end-user and authorize them to self-serve with automated technology will lessen the need for incident escalation and take some of the workloads away from IT team. This will continue user satisfaction, and therefore output, and reduce the time and resources used up on the incident resolution.
Facilitate self-service is particularly crucial during the current circumstances as not only staffs away from the office, which create communication more difficult, but many will have a family commitment (such as children or elderly relatives to look after) that need them to work outside of usual office hours. Implementing solutions that allow for 24/7 contact to IT support is critical. Despite this, it’s also essential to consider other ways for staff to access this support, such as with automated voice solutions. Automated telephony systems can allow a client to submit, access and inform their tickets over the telephone at anytime, even if remote internet connectivity is sophisticated. It also develops the work of IT team by helping them deal with incoming calls without increasing wait times or discard rate.
Upholding best practices
Employing automatic solutions is the best way to help both service desk staff and employees during a period of high pressure, but IT staff still can’t afford to let ITSM excellent practices slip. Treating clients as if they’re customers by determining to resolve problems fast and keep them up to date is vital here. It can be facilitated to make sure announcements, such as system crash or services that are engaged, are relayed to users as soon as probable to keep them informed.
It has never been further essential to maintain a thorough and up-to-date service catalogue existing as the service desk staff has moved to work remotely as well as clients, and some of the services it provides may have changed. Preferably the service catalogue would be the same as when in the organization, but where this isn’t feasible, it should always be clear to the users what they can demand and how. Making this existing for mobile devices is also essential so clients can access it effortlessly any time, anywhere.
Taking a positive approach and make sure that IT support services are flawless before production takes a hit has never been additional crucial than now, as both workforces and their businesses face unforeseen challenges. Implementing automatic, self-service and ensuring IT Service Management best practices are abided by will maximize user productivity and get away some of the day-to-day pressure faced by IT support teams. This will agree to them better manage unrelated issues that might arise in these annoying times.