Tag Archives: IT support

IT Monthly Management Reporting: Incident Tracking

Manage Service, , ,
IT meting over monthly management reports - IT help desk

Communication on a help desk is key to providing quality service

Consistent and organized IT monthly management reports will give your organization or your business will help keep all of your strategies on track. We understand it may take some time, energy, and patience to get past some of the common management reporting issues that other businesses and organizations have faced. Once you have moved past the common issues, you will be able to improve your entire process and the monthly management reporting will be worth it.

Your IT monthly management reporting software will only be as good as the vendor or provider who will offer it. One of the questions that many people have about monthly management reports is what are the features of a well-built monthly management reporting system. You may already have a sound report format or you may just want to be sure that you have covered everything, we hope we can help provide you with the information you need.

Your IT help desk or service desk solution may already come with a set of reports, but sometimes these reports are not the most essential metrics for your team to track. You should focus on the metrics that will help you achieve the most critical aspects and objectives of your business.

Response Time

Incident response time is the number of hours, minutes, or days that have passed when the issue was reported and a resolution was actually found. A fast response time with moderate reopen rates will specify effective customer service.

Resolution Rate

The resolution rate consists of the percentage of problems that were resolved the first time they were brought up. First-time resolution rate will not consist of any repeated calls. When your organization has a high first-time resolution rate, this will generally correlate to outstanding customer service and outstanding customer satisfaction.

Where Are The Highest Incidents?

You will have an opportunity to determine what business departments have the highest need for products and services. Reviewing incidents per department will give you the best chance to identify any holes in your service and provide as an aid in assigning agents correctly.

Current Tickets

Another thing that you should be reported is the number of tickets that are currently active. When you are aware of the number of current tickets you have, you will not be caught off-guard and you will not be overwhelmed by the tickets. Keeping track of the active tickets will also prevent you from having unsatisfied customers because you will not let your tickets get backed up.

Revisiting Tickets

Do you keep track of the percentage of tickets that have to be reopened after the initial contact? If a ticket needs to be reopened after it was marked as resolved may provide you with the insight you need to improve your training. This can also result in a need to perform maintenance and/or repairs on your hardware.

No Resolution

If you have incidents that did not receive a resolution can mean that you have holes and gaps that need to be filled when it comes to your agents. There can also be holes and gaps when it comes to knowing how to properly manage the system.

When you are able to keep track of the number of tickets, incidents, and resolutions, you will be able to do the following:

  • identify tendencies
  • identify what areas have the highest ticket volume and the lowest ticket volume
  • schedule agents appropriately during the high-volume times

You want to ensure your end users and customers are happy and satisfied at the end of the day, and proper IT monthly management reports can provide you with the assistance you need to ensure this does happen. Contact us today for more information on IT management reporting.

Is It Time To Make Adjustments To Your IT Help Desk?

Manage Service, , ,
IT help desk professionals in control room

Using a managed service company can help your internal IT resolve issues faster

For businesses, the IT help desk or service desk is an essential component. If your employees are constantly being slowed down due to problems with technology, productivity and efficiency will be slowed down as well. Businesses that have a good IT help desk on their side can keep everyone equipped to be efficient and productive. When everyone is productive and effective, this will result in less downtime.

At one point, having a “good” help desk was more than enough. However, things have changed significantly. Unfortunately, there are many businesses that are still operating a help desk that would have been better suited a few decades ago. One of the most common approaches to management today is measuring an IT help desk on customer satisfaction, the number of answered calls, and the number of resolved calls. Unfortunately, using this type of strategy or approach lacks foresight.

There are a few signs that will indicate your current IT help desk model is not headed in the right direction, including the following:

You Are Only Looking At It As Another Expense

When someone calls into your help desk and shares any type of information and feedback, this is giving you free and useful intel on how your help desk is operating. When you are able to discover this information and use it to provide feedback to the rest of the organization, you are tapping into the power of an IT help desk. Using this intel and using it to improve the IT help desk is also one of the best ways to reduce the call volume. If you are not doing any of these things, you are wasting an opportunity to use one of the biggest resources you have in your workplace. Your IT Help Desk can provide you with feedback from real users.

You Have No Solution For The Mobility Problems

In many workplaces, employees are given the freedom to commute and work remotely due to the power of mobile devices. Mobility is a growing trend in the business world, and sometimes employees will need assistance when they have mobility issues. If you have not dedicated any of your technology to solving mobility issues, now will be a great time to do so. Not every IT expert will be specialized in remote devices, mobile applications, mobile headsets, etc. This is where you will need the assistance of mobility experts who have the skills to solve mobility problems. If you are not currently equipped with an IT Help Desk that can solve mobility issues, it is not too late to get one. If you cannot maintain those skills and specialties in your workplace, you can consider outsourcing your mobility help desk.

The Calls Are Not Being Managed Properly

We know that you are logging your phone calls and categorizing them, but what else are you doing? If you are not doing more, you are not doing enough. Some calls that come into your help desk will contain vital information about technical problems, downtime, outages, etc. Taking the time to assess this information and prioritize it will allow you to provide feedback to others. You will want to do more than provide the basic information that is on the call log.

If your IT environment is currently struggling, there are ways of getting it back on track. You will not have to become experts overnight and you will not have to go above and beyond to completely modernize your IT environment. You can make some improvements to your current environment to modernize your processes, and you will be able to accomplish more than you think.

If your organization is experiencing any of the above signs, it is important that your management team embrace the fact that changes need to be made. Are you ready to rethink and re-imagine your IT help desk? Please do not hesitate to contact us today for more information.

Working WITH Your Managed Service Provider (MSP)

Manage Service, , , , ,
On site support with a managed service provider. Two business people and a laptop

Are you ready to make a change?

As a business owner or manager, you know how darn right frustrating it can be to get sidetracked with IT support issues, while trying to grow your business and keep employees happy. All too often, upper level professionals are asked to shoulder the responsibility of troubleshooting and solving network related computer issues, as well as problems that surface at the user/individual workstation level. You never want to walk away from the chance to improve your working environment or help out a peer, but the reality is: IT support should not be your job.

Breaking Free

There is no shame in knowing when enough is enough. All too often, the scenario is as follows: Your company’s internal IT policies are virtually non-existent, there is no clear understanding of who is accessing what applications and data from which device, and everyone is bogging you down with requests and cries for help.

Don’t get mad, get organized.

A good managed services provider will work with you to understand where and why problems exist within your organization. Once you can see the lay of the land and understand your technology infrastructure, you’ll begin to move forward in your mind with developing a strategy for freeing up your time, while adding additional technology resources to your toolbox, so that you are better enabled for success.

Change does not happen overnight, and you’ll need a trusted partner to guide you through the steps necessary for transforming your technology issues into opportunities for improvement. What do we mean?

Managed IT Support

Support is so much more than responding to issues. Being proactive and understanding what you need to accomplish with your tech as an organization, is a key step in moving forward with developing a good course of action. You need to understand where problems have existed in the past, and you need to know how you are going to prevent them from occurring in the future.

Opening up clear lines of communication with a managed IT support professional will help both the service provider and organization to benefit from the relationship. You must have a workflow in place that directs users to contact support when an issue comes up, so that it is documented and handled appropriately.

Your IT support staff should handle ALL issues related to the troubleshooting, maintenance, and IMPROVEMENT of your tech resources. Again, this means that management must work with the managed services provider to establish the proper procedures for resolving internal computer related issues and requests.

As a business owner or manager, you should find solace in knowing that your tech support can be seen as a trusted resource, specifically when you need advice and recommendations for streamlining technology, and meeting the needs of your users.

Where To Begin

Documenting what your network looks like, and how it used, is a key step in powering forward with a comprehensive plan for success. Your internal staff should know why they are accessing applications and data the way that they do, and you should act ONLY as a liaison between them and your tech team when making big changes or improvements to your infrastructure.

Managed IT support offers you more value than 24×7 monitoring of your network and tech assets. A good service provider listens to the feedback of all users within an organization, and makes the proper recommendations, while helping to establish a good strategy for growth.

Anyone using technology assets within an organization will be open to experiencing certain moments of hardship or confusion, and you should feel confident in your tech team’s ability to handle issues appropriately whenever they occur. The true value with any managed IT support team is knowing that as issues are resolved and documented, you are effectively building a plan for growth within your overall strategy.

Begin by listing all of the knowledge you have regarding internal IT support issues, so that it can be presented to, and reviewed with, your new managed services provider. Your support staff will have a better chance at efficiently resolving user related issues if they know where you are, and where you plan to go.

Moving Forward

Of course, preventing issues from occurring is top priority within the scope of IT support’s job responsibilities. The data collected from users and network monitoring tools must be consistently evaluated and considered. Your tech team needs to communicate potential problems with you, as well as help you to understand where your environment and users are within the ultimate goals of your technology plan.

Communication is VERY important when working with any vendor. Just as your IT support should be able to work with third-parties to troubleshoot and resolve application and hardware issues within your infrastructure, you too should be able to communicate easily with your support staff. This means that you should expect a careful ear when contacting IT support, as well as clear responses.

Once you have established solid procedures within your organization that enable IT related issues to be resolved in the proper manner, you’ll want to consider moving forward with improvements. Your support staff will have a good understanding of your wants and needs, and can make the proper recommendations.

Establishing a level of trust within all levels of the organization is a key factor in determining the success of your IT staff.

Speaking Of Wants And Needs

It is not selfish or irresponsible to think that your business can benefit from Managed IT Support. Your company’s most valuable assets are its employees, and freeing them from the matrix of confusion and complexity when resolving computer issues, will better enable everyone to work at the peak of their performance. Contact Us to take the next step.

5 Reasons Your Company Can Benefit from Managed IT and Network Monitoring Services (Part 2)

Manage Service, , , , ,
Managed IT and Network Monitoring Services Help Desk Woman with Headset

Managed IT and Network Monitoring Services

Welcome back to the second half of our two-part article on what managed IT services can do for your company from the top of your software stack to the bottom of your hardware infrastructure. Rather than relying on break-fix solutions and intermittent infrastructure maintenance, managed services can catch problems before they occur and make sure you’re always up to date on updates. Last time we talked about ensuring your online services are reliable for your customers and dynamically managing your server load during high traffic times. Let’s pick up where we left off at optimization!

3 Optimizing Your Data Structure

You don’t just need network monitoring in times of crisis, it is a 24/7 job of keeping your website and business network healthy and online. One of the best uses of server and network monitoring services is to identify the most and least efficient processes in your company network. With detailed monitoring and metrics analysis, you can discover things like which programs installed on company computers are slowing down the network and which company data procedures are creating unnecessary calls for redundant data. With these small but influential pieces of information, your managed IT team can begin to optimize your software suite and business procedures for the smoothest possible company network.

4 Identifying IT Issues Early

Computers work in predictable ways, iterating the tasks they have been assigned endlessly and without fail, that is until something goes wrong. A network monitoring team can help you keep an eye out for issues that haven’t caused problems yet but will in the future. Often, a computer system will fail in a way that can be caught days, sometimes even months, ahead of time and cut off at the pass. Detailed monitoring will reveal dangerous sequences in which a program has begun using a massive amount of bandwidth or is using up company storage space on an endless log file that will eventually top-out a server’s storage capacity.

Monitoring is a good way to watch the horizon of your data infrastructure. While some issues will be caused too quickly to predict, most computer problems will ramp up for at least several minutes and often much longer before coming to a head and creating a critical error. Dust in computers can slowly increase heat to crashing levels, redundant processes can eat up processing power, and resource expensive processes can lock up an entire server if they get too bloated. All of these issues can be spotted early and resolved before they interrupt business procedures or client services as long as a dedicated IT team is on the ball.

5 Repairs Immediately When You Need Them

Of course, the aspect of managed IT services that most businesses understand best is having a technician ready to step in the moment an unavoidable or truly unforeseen problem occurs. If one of your servers dies without warning or a software update fails and corrupts an entire database, having monitored services means there’s an expert already paying attention and likely aware of the problem the moment it occurs. The troubleshooting and recovery process begins immediately with a dedicated team of technicians so that your IT infrastructure can be fixed, restored, or properly updated and the interruptions to your business kept at an absolute minimum.

Server and network monitoring are an important window into the technical health of your company. Data flows between company computers, servers, network hubs, out to clients, and back again into CRMs. Servers hold that data, processing and storing it as instructed. Your business runs on its tech infrastructure and managed IT and network monitoring service can help you keep that infrastructure optimized, problem-free, and quickly repaired. For more information on finding the right managed IT plan for your business, contact us today!