3 Things Your IT Help Desk Should Be Doing for You

You and your employees are having a good day at work with everything humming right along. Then, you hit a snag on a program that needs more expertise than you have.

This is the job for the IT help desk. But do you groan, delay, and brace yourself before you ever call them?

If so, you probably need a change in IT support. Your help desk interaction should be a painless experience. It shouldn’t just limit your downtime, but actively improve your business as a whole.

It’s actually quite simple – if the help desk isn’t your friend, it isn’t doing the job.

Here are 3 things it should be doing.

24/7 Support

No small business runs on just a 9-5, 40 hour work week. As an owner or manager, you are on duty at all times. Employees often require flexible schedules. Additionally, they might need to work from home or other remote locations aside from the office.

If they run into IT issues, you can’t afford to wait for extended periods of time. You need to work with a company that can react immediately to your IT issues and offers quick problem resolutions.

Related: 4 Reasons Your Business Needs A Proactive IT Service

Help desks must offer basic support including maintenance for your hardware devices, firmware updates, effective ticketing, and other follow-up measures.

Your help desk should also keep a complete history of all your service calls and the actions taken in addition to fixing issues quickly.

In short, tracking ticket statistics is paramount to success.

Proactive Actions

While a good IT help desk can swoop in during emergencies, a great help desk takes continual proactive measures to prevent business downtime or inefficiencies.

IT pros make certain that the latest updates are installed on-schedule. They also guarantee that possible conflicts between software programs are addressed ahead of time.

Related: How to Tell if You Need Managed Services

Remember, your help desk’s mission is to keep your business connections running smoothly. If they are doing their job, you shouldn’t experience any real emergencies at all.

Business Improvements

Help desks must work to improve your company’s performance by offering improved employee training and development of better tools.

In other words, help desks should provide shortcuts to improve business efficiency.

Related: How to Combat Murphy’s Law in IT

In practice, that may mean recommending a better project management tool or a new piece of hardware. Even though they may not gain for it, they’re still actively helping your business grow and succeed.

The Perfect Help Desk

These are just 3 things that you should be getting from your help desk. While these are generally true across the board, the actual nature of help desks is much broader.

Help desks serve as an extension of your own company. They should be in the loop with your company affairs. They need to proactively respond to and evolve with the changes in your organization.

But where can you find the perfect help desk?

You can start right here. We can work with you to pinpoint your exact business needs.