What Is An IT Help Desk?
An IT help desk can sometimes be misconstrued. Essentially, an IT help desk works as a centralised IT support team, catering to businesses IT support, cybersecurity and business communication needs.
An IT support team may work as part of a companies’ IT department, as well as an outsourced IT team that is accessed using either a software ticket support system or another means such as a central contact number.
Typically, the IT service desks tend to handle individual technical support such as software issues, firewall requests to download new software, through to system outages, general IT maintenance and hardware upgrades.
The benefit of the IT Help Desk and service teams is to ensure that businesses operate seamlessly through the use of IT systems and infrastructures.
How IT Help Desks Benefit Businesses
We’ve become accustomed to IT support within the workplace. As long as there is human error or a chance of computer malfunctions, there is a need for IT help and support. Without IT support services, a business is likely to be far less productive.
There are multiple benefits for IT help desks and how they can improve business operations – some are obvious, while others are more indirect benefits that businesses might not appreciate until they are no longer there.
From an IT support teams perspective, it’s important to highlight these benefits to showcase to businesses how IT help desks help you operate more productively and efficiently.
Increase Productivity and Save Money On Technology
Reduced downtime from IT Issues will increase businesses productivity. As a result, employees can be more productive within their day-to-day working requirements as they’re not stuck researching troubleshooting fixes or solutions to hardware and software malfunctions they are not experienced enough to fix.
Thus, teams and individuals are then able to focus solely on their work and be more productive without the added work of fixing their IT hardware as a result of an IT help desk team. Ultimately, productive teams are likely to be more profitable for an organisation.
Furthermore, IT Support teams can further enhance operations by advising on technology and software depending on budgets, to ensure that businesses are taking advantage of the software that they require, and getting the most value for their investment.
Reduce stress and Improve Employee Satisfaction
The workplace can be stressful enough as it is. In fact, according to Perkbox, 79% of employees surveyed suffer from work-related stress.
A recent Gartner survey found that “92% of employees report occasionally having to deal with unnecessarily difficult and complicated tasks” related to IT support. This is naturally taking time away from their job to focus on IT issues.
IT Help desks can remove this burden, and can often resolve matters swiftly, and remotely. This seamless access to IT support drives employee satisfaction within the workplace higher, allowing your staff to focus on the work they need to do and help grow your business.
Improve Customer Experience
For businesses who own or sell a product, especially digital, there is naturally going to be software updates, customer service requirements, bugs etc. that will require technical support.
This is often the difference between retaining and losing customers. Businesses with poor IT help desk support for their customers are 75% likely to switch brands or service providers as a result of poor customer service, with the UK Ombudsman reporting £37m in business is lost each year due to poor support.
IT support helps desks improve customers to brand touchpoints and reduce the likelihood of losing customers by creating a consistent thread of communication with customers throughout the life cycle of support tickets until they’re resolved.
Acquire Performance Data and Manage Your Network
IT support teams are constantly managing network performance to ensure that businesses operate to optimum efficiency. During situations such as malware downloads, or multiple devices leveraging the network, certain devices might be using more network bandwidth than others. As a result, this slows down the IT network performance and reduces efficiency across the company.
Additionally, the device causing the deficiency is also likely to be performing much slower as a result of the malware or slow network performance.
The IT help desk helps to monitor this situation by putting protocols in place to detect network performance drops, which helps your IT support team to investigate and resolve these issues.
During this process, IT teams can make performance-related decisions with this data to optimise network performance and device management. This keeps your network and team ticking along nicely without really knowing what’s going on under the hood of their IT system.
Learn more about IT Help Desk services
Here at Equity, our experienced team can support you with your day-to-day IT help desk requests and ensure that your business continues to operate smoothly. We provide IT Solutions in Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Hertfordshire, and London to companies of all shapes and sizes. Learn more about our IT Help Desk services and how they could be of benefit to you, or contact us today if you have any questions.