Cloud-based support solutions allow you to consolidate help desk resources, increasing the efficiency of your team and allowing you to do more for your users with less.
Despite efforts to consolidate systems and platforms, the modern IT environment is incredibly complex — and all the signs suggest that this trend will continue indefinitely. The complicated infrastructure presents significant challenges for the IT help desk manager charged with keeping the lights on, and the users happy.
The traditional response has been to buy new support tools or add-ons to cope with each infrastructure development. But in doing so, the support toolkit itself has become increasingly complex and costly. A lack of scalability and interoperability has added to the administrative burden, further compounding the cost of providing support.
Without access to the right support solutions, your teams are making unnecessary, expensive desk-side visits simply because it is easier than working with the existing collection of tools.
Your existing tools are wasting money
Your team is under constant pressure to improve customer satisfaction, close more tickets, and to cut costs wherever possible. If you are constantly increasing spend to prop up the existing toolkit, you are simultaneously reducing return on each support call.
If your investments are not reducing the number of site visits made by technicians, are they actually delivering a return at all? After all, an engineer in transit is one less body able to assist with incoming calls.
Stop the sprawl
Rather than permitting further sprawl, you need to consolidate tools. This delivers several benefits, including:
- Reduced licensing and upgrade costs
Fewer solutions require less additional investment moving forward. - Simplified support provision
By reducing the available tools and leaving those best suited to the needs of your business, help desk agents will find it easier to locate the right one for the ticket they are working on. - Lower cost of ownership
Less tools require less infrastructure and administrative oversight, reducing the cost of using and running them.
Ideally you are trying to reduce the number of support solutions used to as few as possible — just one if possible. It is possible to do more with less if you choose the right remote software solution for your team.
Stop going on-site
Key to closing more tickets more quickly is to reduce the number of site visits your technicians make. You must implement help desk solutions that increase the range of functions available for providing remote support. The more your technicians can do from their desks, the less time wasted on-site — and the more tickets they can complete each day.
Start going off-site
The good news is that there are still more savings and efficiencies to be had by leveraging the power of the cloud. Choosing a hosted support solution gives you all the functionality you need to maintain a global user base, such as:
- Reduced infrastructure costs to zero
The provider is responsible for supplying capacity, bandwidth and processing required to manage your helpdesk. - Future-proofed solutions
You gain access to new features without paying upgrade costs. - Simplified deployment
Your cloud-based tools are available anytime, any place without the hassle of configuring VPN connections back to the company data center. - Simplified support provisions
You can support users anywhere in the world without building global infrastructure of your own.
Using cloud-based support solutions will greatly increase the speed at which you can improve your service offering, not least because you are no longer investing in propping up a system that is not fully fit for purpose. Any cost savings can then be reinvested in other strategic measures that better serve your users.
The cloud and the future of your support provisions
As your IT infrastructure becomes more complex, there is no reason that your support solution has to follow suit. By moving to a cloud-based alternative, your engineers can take advantage of cutting-edge features without the accompanying overheads of managing and maintaining the underlying system.
Takeaways
Remember, the savvy IT help desk manager can use the cloud to:
- Consolidate existing help desk tools into a single, comprehensive solution.
- Reduce costly site visits by technicians.
- Future-proof their help desk tools.
- Increase the reach and effectiveness of their engineers
- Lower the total cost of ownership of their helpdesk systems and operations.
