Optimizing Your Help Desk for IT Healthcare Using a Portal

Many help desks for IT healthcare service departments are overburdened with the volume of support calls received and find it difficult to streamline the creation of the help desk support issues.

Calls are randomly received in various ways: phone call, email, dreaded voice mail, verbal, or manually assigned via the software. This unstructured call creation process fosters out-of-control call management, impossible call triage management and improper workload assignment.

Here are just some of the issues that the help desk and service desk face on a regular basis:

1. Support calls lack definition and clarity.
2. Calls get lost or dropped in email, voice mail, note books, etc.
3. The importance of a support call is not properly understood.
4. There is no mechanism in place for call avoidance.
5. Many of the calls do not get formalized within the help desk software for IT healthcare.
6. The help desk personnel don’t know who is working on what.
7. The help desk gets inundated with calls that could be avoided.

So the question now becomes: Why? What is the root cause of this scenario? Can it be changed for the better? Well surprisingly the answer is yes, it can be changed. I don’t mean you can cure all the ailments 100%, but you can drastically reduce the poisonous unwanted symptoms and optimize your IT help desk for healthcare by properly implementing a self-serve customer portal.

The self-serve customer service portal should be easy to use to submit and view tickets, promoted with your organization and seamlessly integrated into you help desk for IT departments software system. Below are some simple guidelines to follow when designing and integrating your help desk ticketing portal.

1. Ensure the help desk portal makes it easy for the user to understand how to submit and view a helpdesk request.
2. Make the authentication seamless with the users network ID. Where possible, use automatic login for customers.
3. Provide simple submission forms that force the customer to answer specific short questions that will properly categorize the ticket and obtain the right amount of information for effective ticket triage management.
   • Provide a drop down product field for items that requires attention (hardware, software type..)
   • Ask who is affected (just me or an entire department)? This will establish the urgency. If you ask them the urgency (high, medium, low) guess what they will select the majority of the time?
   • Ask: Can you still work? Are you prevented from completing your duties?
   • Ask: Is there a work around until the issue is resolved?
   • Ask who the primary contact and secondary are, if required?
   • Where is the physical location of the issue?
4. Politely return support calls sent in via emails with easy instructions to on how to access the portal and have a standard reply promoting the new company direction for the change and explain how everyone will benefit.
5. In your voice mail message indicate: “All support calls are to be placed via the customer service portal located at URL …”
6. Prior to the launch of the customer service portal, send out an email bulletin to all of your customers noting the new change, when it will be implemented, and how the company will benefit. Most of the issues caused by change are not the change itself, but the lack of communication beforehand.
7. Ensure upper management and the executive teams are on board and support the new initiative.

Many organizations we have worked with continue to reap the benefits from implementing a self-serve customer portal for IT healthcare and enjoy the well-managed, professional help desk engine they have oiled and tuned up over time.

Feel free to visit us at www.entry.com and ask to speak with a consultant or click here for a demo.