Approaches to improve your IT Help Desk Economics

With the advent of digital transformations, cloud migrations and IT systems becoming more disparate through SaaS and other online productivity solutions, the IT Help Desk has become vital for keeping organizations operating a peak efficiency. Having an outstanding Help desk isn’t a convenience any more, it’s a necessity. It has become a major factor for employee satisfaction within the organization and a key component to driving productivity. 

But it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Many businesses fail miserably at their Help Desk operations primarily due to the lack of IT experts, limitations in hours service (or hiring lower skilled agents to offset the expense of staffing a 24×7 service), not having proper tools – or just not using them – and inadequate processes. A productive Help Desk not only requires skillful resources but also requires efficient processes, governance and quality reporting, and certified technical expertise and technology. Here are the six major considerations to optimize your IT Help Desk costs and transform them from being a cost centre to the growth engine for your business. 

Focus on First Call Resolution (FCR)

Users don’t want to log several support tickets and call the IT Help Desk staff multiple times to solve their issue. It’s expected that logging a single support ticket or call with the Help Desk will end their involvement in the issue resolution.  Your staff want minimal interruptions so that they can focus on their core business tasks. Deliver significant value by ensuring employees have the right solutions on the very first interaction.  By achieving a better FCR you’ll be improving employee satisfaction and driving down the cost per interaction within the Help Desk. 

Improve Service Quality

Not all issues can be solved in the first call.  Having a detailed understanding of your IT Help Desk’s service quality is crucial in sustaining a high satisfaction record. By diligently monitoring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the service your Help Desk provides, you’ll be able to determine where your problems exist. For example, if you receive feedback that employees are unhappy with delayed responses and high wait times, your KPIs should pinpoint the issues and help you design a solution.

Better Process and Methodology

It’s not always easy to stay ahead in everything. You might be burdened with a massive ticket heap that runs from “Why don’t I have the internet connection?” to “why is my desktop running so slow?” Sorting them all might take time. Setting up a better process for categorizing, resolving and documenting fixes in self help portals will lead to faster resolutions and lower ticket volumes over time. Visit source to read more.

What You Need to Know about Meltdown and Spectre

What are Meltdown and Spectre?

Meltdown and Spectre and are side-channel vulnerabilities that enable attacks based on information gained from the physical implementation of almost all CPUs manufactured since 1995. Essentially, normal interactions between operating system memory management and CPU optimization technologies could allow attacks that expose otherwise secure and private information.

The vulnerabilities were identified simultaneously by Google Project Zero, the Institute of Applied Information Processing and Communications (IAIK) at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), and others.

Meltdown

Meltdown breaks the isolation between user applications and operating systems. A Meltdown attack could allow an application to access the memory, and thus information, of other applications and the underlying operation system.

Spectre

Spectre breaks the isolation between applications and allows attackers to trick otherwise normal and well-designed applications into leaking information. Some safety checks and best practices can even increase the attack surface and make applications more vulnerable to Spectre.

Is my Business Affected by these Vulnerabilities?

Yes. These two vulnerabilities can be exploited to expose any information contained in memory on almost every computing system manufactured in the past two decades, including workstations, tablets, cell phones, IoT devices, and most importantly servers hosted in collocated, virtualized, and cloud environments, such as managed cloud hosting.

Shared cloud environments are particularly vulnerable as an attack on one vulnerable virtual machine could expose the information on other environments on the same physical host. JavaScript based attacks are also possible through a web browser.

Microsoft, Apple, Arm, Google, Intel, Amazon, VMware, Citrix, various Linux providers, and Mozilla have all confirmed that their hardware and/or software is vulnerable to these attacks. Everything you and your company uses on a daily basis is vulnerable. Visit source to read more.

Contact Us:

Pathway Communications

Address: 95 Apple Creek Blvd.

City: Markham

State: Ontario

Zip Code: L3R 1C7

Phone: 416-214-6363

Email: anusha.parikh@pathcom.com