In today’s workforce, demonstrating that your team is efficient is just about as important as actually being efficient.

Both are good, of course, and important in a culture where every department is often asked, “what can your group do better and how can you do it?” (If you haven’t figured it out by now, the correct answers are “A lot” and “Let us show you”)

Here’s a sneak peek of another correct answer – by switching to cloud-based help desk software, your IT team can achieve a high deal of efficiency. It can save time, improve processes, and, possibly best of all, provide solid proof of what you’ve accomplished. Well done!

For those already saying “that’s too crazy!” we’ll respond that “it’s crazy enough to work well.” Here are some examples:

• Mobile interface. Incident reports/job ticket can come in via email as usual. But you can view and update them from any mobile device, rather than only at your official work station desktop. This allows you and your team members to be more responsive and visit and prioritize different locations rather than having to check in at HQ after every job completion.
• Integration with email and calendar programs. This can go both ways – the person who submitted a help request can receive a confirmation email, and possibly an appointment request when the repairs can be made, provided it’s not a high-priority item. The IT members can use these systems to schedule their jobs throughout the day or respond directly to the people who filed request with any questions.
• Self-Help Knowledge Base: In busy companies, some sort of collective archive can be vital. This can show what upgrades have been made to particular work stations, custom fixes/local solutions to software, any code modification to open source programs, or even some FAQ/how-to tips. These can be accessible to every user on the network, perhaps as an opportunity for non-IT employees to try their own troubleshooting before calling in the pros. Or it could be available only to IT team members as a resource for past fixes.
• Auto assign. Some help desks use a first-come first-serve format, which isn’t always the best use of people’s time, and could lead to the quicker techs only taking tickets they like. Instead, consider a way that can automatically assign certain tickets to certain people. Perhaps it can be defined as “all tickets on the 2^ndfloor go to ____ since he’s down there today.” Or “All tickets from this building will go to ___ since she’s the closest.”
• Your cloud-based help desk should include the ability to export reports as PDFs or spreadsheets. These can be collected to show progress over time, or given to managers to demonstrate overall volume and performance.

Those five items are just a sample of many ways this type of help desk structure could improve your team’s workplace’s efficiency. Consider contacting Grouplink for more suggestions about how to incorporate these features into your organization.