5 IT Help Desk Mistakes to Avoid

In today’s world, the job of an IT Help Desk professional is more important than ever -- and more stressful. With so many tickets and requests coming in every day, it can be easy to slip up and make mistakes that can cause your team’s productivity and efficiency to suffer. Be on the lookout for these five avoidable Help Desk mistakes:

1. Disorganization

Without a good way to organize tickets and inquiries as they come in, Help Desk teams can quickly amass an enormous, confusing pile of requests. Lack of organization quickly slows a team down, forcing members to dig through piles of correspondence looking for buried pieces of information. On top of that, there’s no way to easily prioritize tasks -- and it’s incredibly easy for requests to sink to the bottom or be accidentally deleted, causing additional headaches and stress for everyone involved.

2. Failing to Communicate

Have you ever submitted a help or customer support ticket, only to wait weeks for a response (if you even got one)? Then you know the frustration that customers feel when there’s little communication about the status of their request. It’s imperative to keep them updated and involved in the process as much as possible -- failing to do so can cause confusion and stress, creating a poor customer service environment for those requesting help.

3. Letting Your Impatience Show

It can be difficult to keep your cool under stress. With so many items on your plate, patience may seem hard to come by -- but letting that frustration seep out is a huge mistake. Lashing out can insult your customers and deter other members of your organization from seeking out your team’s help. It’s much better to find a constructive way to channel your irritation than to let it manifest in unflattering ways.

4. Lack of Teamwork

A team that works together succeeds together. However, Help Desk team members sometimes become siloed, working diligently on their own projects and forgetting to use one another as resources. Communication is highly important for optimal teamwork. Even at times when each member must focus in on separate tasks, keeping one another informed is imperative -- and working collaboratively on certain projects can help maximize efficiency.

5. Ignoring Trends

A malfunction keeps occurring with a certain brand of equipment at your organization -- but without a way to track and look back on trends, your team may not notice the coincidence. Keeping tabs on maintenance history and documenting customer correspondence allows you to look back on what worked and what failed over time. Failing to track this information can lead to more avoidable errors and malfunctions in the future, and can keep teams from identifying and fixing the root problem.

Avoid Mistakes with IT Help Desk Software

The above mistakes can stymie your team’s progress, disrupt its workflow, and cause any number of additional problems -- but these mistakes are completely avoidable. With the right Help Desk software, your team can easily sidestep the same slip-ups that can cause catastrophic issues at other organizations.

A dedicated solution like Issuetrak eradicates problems of disorganization by providing a streamlined, easily-manageable database to store tickets and correspondence of all kinds. With automatic notifications and updates sent at each step of the resolution process, customers and teammates alike can stay aware of a ticket’s progress. Reporting tools and asset management features allow you to visualize trends and keep detailed tabs on individual pieces of equipment, ensuring a thorough inventory every time. These features work in concert to reduce stress and headaches, save time, and get your team running like clockwork again.

Interested in learning how Issuetrak can help you avoid these Help Desk mistakes? Reach out to one of our product experts to learn more!