[This guest post was written by Lisa Strack, the Director of Marketing for IssueTrak] How do I reset my password? Why are my documents printing landscape instead of portrait? Simple IT snafus are a natural part of life around the office, but by having a good self-service tech support portal available to your employees, you can reduce the number of calls to your help desk, increasing productivity and freeing up your IT team to deal with more complicated and pressing technical concerns. Self-service features provide a specific framework for employees to solve problems on their own. Each framework will be unique to the company’s scope of work, products and service offering as well as the tech systems used in the office. Self-service features can help give employees a piece of mind knowing they have the capability to solve their own problems throughout the day. Here are some benefits to consider when augmenting your available self-service features: 1. Build a body of knowledge Companies stand to gain a lot from implementing self-service help desk software which allows employees to solve IT problems independently. Chances are, your IT team deals with the same basic set of questions repeatedly on a regular basis. Adding self-service features to your help desk allows your IT team to establish consistent protocol for dealing with similar problems, as well as allows them to establish a growing library of resources as the needs of employees grow and change. 2. Reduce bureaucracy In an office without self-service features, it’s easy to get bogged down in bureaucratic chains of command. Say, for instance, that printing’s gone awry over in HR. In an office without a self-service help desk, solving the problem means navigating a complicated maze of who to call. Self-service features can shatter the labyrinth of phone calls and emails, letting the average employee take charge of solving issues themselves. A time-sucking maze of communication can be easily reduced to a quick check with the self-service help desk, saving time and increasing productivity for everyone. 3. Your employees are smart Your employees are smart people—that’s hopefully why you hired them! Technical know-how may seem daunting to someone whose area of expertise falls outside the world of hardware and code, but simple how-to’s can be easy to use. An easy-to-navigate, easy-to-follow guide to solving common IT problems can put your team’s natural good sense to work. Empower your employees by giving them the ability to take their own first steps to solving IT problems. If even a small percentage of the responsibility of solving basic problems can diverted from your IT team, everyone’s workload will become lighter. This logic especially holds true for companies with bring your own device (BYOD) policies. If your employees are savvy enough to know their own gear, it’s probably a sign that they are ready to learn to handle basic fixes on their own. Lisa Strack is the Director of Marketing for IssueTrak, handling all marketing, PR and communications for IssueTrak as well as the company website. IssueTrak is powerful and versatile business operations software, enabling organizations to define, manage, and automate critical business processes, including issue tracking, customer support operations, and help desk and IT service desk.
