IT innovation drives a business’ profitability and opportunities for growth. Hence it’s necessary to reduce IT cost-to-serve through best practices and proper solutions to conserve your human and financial resources. First, you’ll need to understand which best practices apply in your scenario and their potential impact. IT consulting and services can help you make these assessments and figure out improvements that will benefit your business’ specific situation. Knowing your current IT infrastructure and its true efficiency levels can help you figure out ways to save money.

Role of the IT Help Desk

After the assessment, the prime focus is the optimization of your IT infrastructure. To keep budgets under control, your IT infrastructure continuously needs to be monitored, updated, and modified according to the changing needs of your business. It’s one of the major reasons why IT help desk is better outsourced. It functions beyond standard troubleshooting, repairing, and maintaining systems. It also involves optimizing the entire infrastructure through best practices that save money that can be invested into innovation.

Best Practices

Although best practices vary according to your business needs, below are a few examples:

• Deploy server clusters: Server downtime is a major spending area. Server clusters enable applications to continue running uninterrupted during downtime caused by maintenance work, hardware crash, or network failure. The application requirements such as capacity and storage are analyzed. After, an implementation plan for deploying the clusters is created. A support structure is then designed for the server clusters and data protection is provided for times of failure. Once the clusters are secured, they’re tested and deployed.
• Automate provisioning systems: Using pre-defined procedures, the provisioning or servicing systems deploy an IT service electronically without manual support. Users can customize the services themselves thus saving substantial human resources and time that’d otherwise go into activation or change of services.
• Engage in patch management and software/application deployment techniques: By doing this, the system’s vulnerabilities can be overcome and missing or relevant patches, hotfixes, security updates, and patch reports can be deployed by a patch management solution.
• Transition to server virtualization: The hardware is reduced to a great extent as all computing resources are shifted to the cloud. Some of the benefits of server virtualization include the reduction of the energy and data centre footprint, faster provisioning, and improvements to disaster recovery.
• Use standard network security management techniques such as strong firewalls, limited access, data encryption, continuous backup, etc.
• Manage data according to standard practices.

Reducing IT Cost-to-Serve is always a priority. This post demonstrates the need for best practices and potential solutions that reduce IT costs.

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Here are 5 benefits that cloud services can bring your way:

• Easy and secure access to your data: Since your data is stored securely on remote servers that can be easily accessed using mobile devices, from anywhere and at anytime, you no longer need to stay tethered to your PC.
• Scalability: Most cloud service providers offer the pay-as-you-go model, which empowers you to scale your cloud resources up or down based on your business requirements. What’s more, you can easily customize these services to make them more suitable for your needs.
• Reduced costs: Since you don’t need to invest in infrastructure, software and hardware, training, maintenance, etc., you can save a lot of money. Your cloud provider handles expensive updates, quality control, and data management and you don’t have to worry about hiring expensive IT resources to take care of these tasks.
• Efficiency and flexibility: Cloud computing doesn’t just offer scalability, it helps you work with remote workers who are connected worldwide through the Internet. Therefore, if you are thinking about hiring remote services like a virtual help desk, cloud technology is your best option.
• Disaster management: Unlike your on-site desktops, servers, and network equipment that can malfunction or lack performance and adversely affect and stall your business operations, storing data on remote servers with top-notch security, guaranteed resources, redundancy, and a disaster management system helps you to continue with your work no matter what happens. 

Business cloud computing also helps users work fast as they don’t need to install large, complicated applications on their local computers, since their provider will offer high-capacity remote servers, and the requisite IT tools to facilitate seamless work. So, whether you are thinking about using specific operations like data recovery services or help desk services, or you want to move all of your business operations to a more secure and scalable environment, cloud computing is the right solution.

So, what are you waiting for? Act today to assess your business needs and find a service provider that can help you get the maximum benefits of cloud technology.

Summary: Cloud computing has emerged as the ultimate IT solution that’s increasingly adopted by small start-ups and big enterprises alike. Explore some of the benefits of cloud technology.

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If you decide in favor of help desk outsourcing, it becomes even more critical to keep track of the efficiency your service provider in managing your help desk.

Here are 10 metrics that can help you monitor the health of your help desk:

• New tickets: The ticket tracking system is the core of your help desk. By assessing how many new tickets your help desk handles in a month, week, or day, you can plan your staffing requirements.
• Customer’s preferred contact method: These days, customers can contact your help desk through phone calls, emails, web forms, chats, or social networking platforms. Since each of these modes requires different skills, identifying, tracking, and preparing for each contact method is crucial for determining your staffing needs and for responding quickly to help desk requests.
• Tickets solved: By assessing if your help desk can solve most of the ticket requests that come in a week without escalation to higher tier support, you can decide whether your help desk is working efficiently or falling behind.
• Reply and wait times: Long first reply and wait times lead to dissatisfied customers. Within a reasonable time period after your customer makes a request, your help desk should send at least an acknowledgement that the problem is being worked on. Whether you opt for help desk outsourcing to handle technology infrastructure management issues or managed security services, wait times too should be reduced to ensure that issues are being resolved without much delay.
• Resolution time: After a ticket is created, the time taken to solve it for the first time is called the first resolution time. If the ticket is re-opened one or more times to further correct a customer issue, this time is called the full resolution time. An increasing gap between these two times means that more training is required to speed up the resolution times.
• Backlog: If the number of tickets solved in a week is much less than the new requests, there’s bound to be a backlog. When this happens, it would indicate that your help desk is overwhelmed by support requests, and needs more staff and resources to solve the tickets.
• Predicted backlog: Calculating the predicted backlogs helps you note where the team is falling behind and take appropriate measures.
• Ticket distribution: Scrutinizing your ticket distribution can alert you about a persistent problem with your products/services. If you notice a sudden increase in the amount of support requests coming to your help desk, you should check for underlying issues and report them to appropriate internal staff for resolution.
• Satisfaction ratings: With reports and dashboards of customer satisfaction ratings, you can spot problems with your help desk and products/services.
• Employee performance: By identifying which help desk professionals are top performers and which ones need additional training and resources, task allocation can be streamlined.

Summary: Ensuring that your customers are happy with your products and services is crucial for the success of your business. Use the 10 metrics above to monitor the health of your help desk and keep your customers satisfied with your service.

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