As an IT professional, you fully understand the value of automation, yet your department may be among the many who still use spreadsheets or semi-functional databases to track support tickets. A bit like the cobbler’s children, the IT function often has less money to spend on automation than some of the more high profile departments in an organization.

Sales and marketing, operations and financial applications always seems to come first yet automating the IT help desk can benefit the entire organization. When support personnel are solving problems instead of sorting paper or spreadsheets, they are advancing the cause of the business or organization.

IT support people are often some of the highest paid employees so every organization needs to keep them doing what they do best – solving customer and user problems. Technicians need to take a hard look at everything they do on a daily basis and find ways to automate as many of their functions as possible.

Benefits of Automating the IT Help Desk

Unfortunately most IT support people spend far too much of their time fielding routine questions, receiving, tracking and reporting on tickets. Experienced support teams should be working on problem/resolution rather than tracking and distributing tickets.

The everything HelpDesk® from GroupLink automates the IT Help Desk function and optimizes the time of the support teams. Its many features and the associated benefits include:

• Email to Ticket Conversion– every email for support is automatically converted into a serial numbered support ticket and entered into the help desk system for processing. Nobody from the support team has to check for messages because support tickets are automatically set for distribution to the next available agent
• Auto Assign Tickets– the tickets are not simply placed in the queue but are first checked to see who should receive the ticket based on location, time of day, urgency, category and more. Administrators have full control over setting parameters to maximize their support personnel
• Business Process Automation– IT support professionals appreciate this feature the most because it means the menial functions are completed automatically. Administrators create templates base to schedule routine tasks and set up others for group processing at specific times. The utility includes a wide variety of options designed to fit the needs of all kinds of support desks. You can even generated regularly scheduled preventative maintenance tickets and track repairs and comments so the IT Help Desk becomes an asset tracking system.
• Ticket Assignment and Escalation – Tickets are automatically assigned to the appropriate technician and escalated as necessary based on pre-established parameters. If a ticket has been the in the system for a predetermined amount of time and has not yet been resolved, it can be automatically routed to a manager for follow up action.

Automating the IT Help Desk is an excellent way to optimize the time of an IT support department. Once the ticketing process is automated, IT support people are free to focus on the things they were hired to do. They use their skills to research and solve customer and user problems rather than the boring and tedious process of tracking tickets.