What Do You Think Might Be Some Of The Challenges Of A Global Support Service Desk?

MSPs discover soft-skill, tech challenges in help desk ticketing

Service provider personnel must work through automation, staffing and software challenges when they deploy assistance desk ticketing key business direction systems.

Resolving customers' It issues through help desk-bound ticketing is a core MSP office and service providers use diverse help desk software products in the deject or on premises. Merely fifty-fifty though today's software offers an array of functions, MSPs sometimes still fall curt in hitting their targeted levels of efficiency and productivity.

Common features of aid desk systems include ticket management, routing and tracking, as well equally automated alerts and escalation, multichannel advice, existent-time conversation, performance monitoring, a self-service portal, storage for documentation, It asset management, SLA management and customization.

Help desk systems usually integrate with an MSP's remote monitoring and management system. Merely their internal usage varies as does a service provider's experience

Growing pains

For whatever MSP or managed security services provider, coming together customers' It needs is easier when there are fewer of them. Things become more challenging when your business organization grows, noted Joshua Skeens, COO of Logically, an MSP based in Portland, Maine.

"The next matter you know, you lot have ane,000 customers and yous don't know how to practise things because every customer is different, and [their] processes and products are dissimilar," Skeens said. "So, having the ability to shop information from a knowledgebase perspective is very important."

Most MSPs struggle with maintaining SLAs and knowing how to assign them to customers, he said. For instance, if a contract stipulates a 4-60 minutes response time and the MSP doesn't respond in four hours, the service provider has broken its SLA.

A help desk-bound system should have some automation built in, Skeens said. That fashion, an MSP can fix information technology upward to receive an alert 1 hr before an SLA volition be cleaved and some other alert at the 15-minute mark. If an SLA is still broken, "there needs to be reporting and [nosotros need to] alert several people that nosotros broke it," he said.

Previously, this had to be washed manually, so there weren't a lot of checks and balances, Skeens said. "Well-nigh high-level platforms have [automation] built in now … I would like to meet MSPs leverage that a lot more than because it would make them more efficient and drive a meliorate feel for their customers. That'due south what a lot of MSPs are trying to get to."

Frequently, people are reactive rather than proactive, Skeens added. Equally MSPs add customers, the power to provide help desk support may create a gap that will exist too large for many to shut, he said.

"One of the reasons MSPs historically get to nearly that … $1 1000000 mark and tin can't become farther is because they didn't build automation and features" into their assistance desk systems," Skeens explained. Building in such capabilities after the fact becomes likewise time consuming and expensive, he noted.

Still edifice in automation to create efficiencies will increase both customer -- and employee -- satisfaction, he said. Referencing the Peachy Resignation, Skeens said people often leave jobs considering "they're non emotionally satisfied.

In add-on, COVID-19 and the growth of remote workers take placed higher demands on help desk-bound staff.

"I take the lens of 'What can we do to make employees' jobs easier and make them more satisfied?'" Skeens said.

A lot of times, the answer lies in taking away mundane tasks that employees must do over and over, he said. When tasks are automated, "yous don't accept to call back to practise these things and it creates a better environment for them to work in; on the flip side, information technology makes the customer happier," he said.

support tier chart — Aid desk-bound support is a cadre MSP offering.

Soft-skills shortages

Lunavi, an MSP based in Cheyenne, Wyo., provides 24/7 tier one (customer outage) and tier two (deposition of service) support, and the main challenge is finding people with soft skills, said Tracy Kubasti, the company's senior vice president, global service heart.

An MSP aims to hire people with critical thinking skills who can expect across the technical issues and delve deeper into the crusade of a problem a customer is having, she said. That requires gathering all the information from that client to properly escalate an issue to the right place.

Automated responses tin can exist frustrating for the customer and we try to dig out what's really going on.

Tracy KubastiSenior vice president, global service heart at Lunavi

"Automated responses can be frustrating for the customer and we try to dig out what'southward really going on," Kubasti said. It could be something simple, enabling those tickets to be handled seamlessly. "But when a customer is in a complex situation and nosotros accept to put that into our engineering group for troubleshooting, just making certain nosotros're asking all the right questions and getting the correct data" can exist a challenge, she noted.

In addition, the Information technology staffing shortage has made it very difficult to recruit and retain staff, and Kubasti said this has prompted Lunavi to become more artistic.

"Nosotros work multiple angles," she said. Because their 24/7 team is in Cheyenne, one tactic visitor officials have used is to work with the local community college to find candidates who have good soft skills. Lunavi will and so train them in the technical areas, she said.

The goal is to find people who are clear, smart and can learn the engineering science, she said. "We've taken that angle of 'How do we develop our people from the inside?'"

Lunavi besides wants people who are good at trouble solving, which means "knowing where to become to get answers and actually thinking virtually 'How do I solve this problem? What practise I take available to work this trouble?' Not only click a button and move on," she said.

Software challenges

MNJ Technologies, an MSP based in Buffalo Grove, Ill., thought information technology was being more efficient using the same assistance desk-bound software both for internal and external ticketing. Simply the company has two queues and sometimes client emails go to the incorrect queue and the system doesn't pick that up, said Dasha Stepp, director of service commitment.

She tried irresolute the electronic mail address customers employ to send a ticket, but the software does non have automation functionality. That "doesn't allow me to practise clear separation of the queues," Stepp explained, "so I have to have someone physically look at tickets" and determine which ones belong where.

This has resulted in some customers non receiving a prompt response to a ticket if the designated person is not bachelor to manually get in and check the queues, Stepp said.

Tickets "should exist checked constantly. But sometimes someone goes to dejeuner or steps abroad or is addressing something else and it'due south hard to have someone on 24/7," she explained. Even with a third-party network operations center handling some of the tickets, Stepp said it's still not a seamless procedure.

The organization also doesn't provide good visibility into her team'south workload. "That means that I may assign a ticket to someone without realizing they already have too much on their plate," Stepp said.

The curt-term fix for Stepp is having someone review people's workloads and tickets and spread the work out, since the help desk system also doesn't automatically assign tickets.

"It's working better than not having anyone," she said. "It's definitely taken the brunt off my shoulders. Simply again, if that person goes to luncheon or steps away or is pulled into a conversation" tickets may not be addressed quickly.

The ultimate solution for MNJ is to switch to a dissimilar CRM system that "covers all areas and provides meliorate automation for all my functions" without human intervention, she said. This is in the works for 2023.

Stepp'due south advice to other MSPs is to sympathise what processes you want your help desk software system to resolve. "We chose the system we thought could do the job and then nosotros fitted the processes into that organization, and we should have washed information technology the other style effectually."