3 Signs Your Help Desk Provider Is Serious About the Future

When an experienced professional, John, needs to contact your service desk, his preferred method is to call. However, his colleague, Laura, fresh out of business school, favors having self-service options to be able to solve the problem herself. If necessary, she’d like to be able to immediately contact a support team member via chat.

A generational shift is happening in the work force – from Baby Boomers, Gen Xers and Millennials to the iGeneration (workers born in 1994 and later). Along with changing demographics, a shift in desired service desk contact types is becoming more obvious.

How does this transition affect the service desk? It’s simple: In today’s workplace, you need to provide multiple contact methods to satisfy your users’ varied preferences – and provide flexible pricing too.

Here are three signs your service desk provider is serious about the workplace of today, and the future.

Sign No. 1: Your provider offers multiple contact options

Working with a service desk provider that offers several contact options, to satisfy the different generations and preferences within your workforce, is a necessity. While Baby Boomers may prefer to use the phone or email for support, Millennials and the iGeneration are more likely to want to communicate via chat or email, or take care of their own IT challenges via self-service options such as knowledge-based articles.  

Sign No. 2: Your provider compiles reporting, analytics and recommendations

Did you know that, in general, roughly 30 percent of all service desk calls are related to password resets? You should select a provider who tracks why your employees contact them, so that any simple requests can be efficiently managed, such as offering self-service assistance for or automating those problems in the future.

Also, choose a provider who offers insight and recommendations on how your employees prefer to contact the service desk, with regularly updated analytics. This type of data and advisory partnership will help shift your users to flexible and accommodating, lower-cost contact methods.

For example, offering a self-service system for employees to reset their own passwords is an efficient, low-cost way to serve them. However, even more beneficial is receiving ongoing data to see which contact method your users prefer, along with service desk-provided communications to help shift your users to lower-cost contact methods.    

With monthly analytics and marketing support, your service desk provider and IT department can collaborate on ways to shift users to faster and lower-cost contact methods.

Sign No. 3: Your provider has flexible pricing, with options for less expensive tech support

Many providers still demand a flat fee or per-user price. You should seek out a provider that offers flexibility, including options for scalable pricing based on the contact methods your users prefer.

For example, if your workers use self-service options 60 percent of the time, you should pay less than an organization whose workers use self-service options only 20 percent of the time.

Moreover, a service desk provider who can help shift your users to lower-cost services – through marketing, simple training and education of your employees – is one worth pursuing.

How do your employees prefer to contact the service desk? Please comment!

Are you seeing a generational shift in your tech support users? Have any trends emerged in terms of how your users contact your service desk? Share your thoughts below, and let us know what suggestions you have for your users’ favorite or requested alternate contact methods.