Six Steps to the Right Remote Help Desk Solution

In the future, more and more people will work from home. In fact, in Germany, a new law has been proposed that could establish home office options as an employee right. The tricky thing is that employees in their own home generally have no onsite IT support. So if technical problems occur, a loss of productivity can quickly result. Unless the companies have provided a remote help desk.

OTRS Group has created a phased plan for companies to determine the best possible remote help desk solution:

One: Analyze employee needs. Determine how quickly they need support, and define situations when they might be able to help themselves.

Two: These needs should be taken into account when defining remote operating procedures and selecting an appropriate help desk system. In addition, the processes should be designed in accordance with ITIL^®.

Three: Evaluate help desk solutions. Ideally, it should include the following components:

• A cloud-based system to ensure that employees can easily access it from anywhere. This also relieves the burden placed on the company’s own IT team, which will not have to worry about providing hosting and maintenance.
• The ability to create custom notifications related to support cases to ensure smooth processes and to keep both help desk staff and end users up-to-date.
• Multiple communication channels (multi-channel), such as e-mail, chat, telephone, social media, etc. This leads to an enhanced user experience.
• SLA (service level agreement) management and reporting functions provide a good overview of the services provided and their success.
• A self-service portal provides employees with information on how to solve simple problems themselves. FAQs and KBAs (knowledge based articles) also provide good first-level support.
• APIs (programming interfaces) to allow connection to other systems.

Four: Security functions and processes provided by the evaluated help desk solution should always play a major role in the selection of the appropriate system.

Five: Once selected, the solution should now be aligned with the user requirements and the previously defined processes.

Six: When ready, it is important to have extensive communication and training for the help desk team and end users.

“I assume that the number of employees working from home will continue to increase. In the future, there may even be a legal right to work from a home office. This makes it all the more important for every single employee to have reliable IT support,” says Christopher Kuhn, COO at OTRS AG. “The ideal help desk should not only ensure that problems are solved quickly, but should also support employees in the home office so that they can freely allocate their time. The self-service portal in OTRS allows employees to get help and information around the clock in order to solve a problem themselves”.

OTRS Group is the manufacturer and the world’s largest provider of the service management suite OTRS, awarded with the SERVIEW CERTIFIED TOOL seal of approval. It offers flexible solutions for process and communication management to companies of all sizes, saving them time and money.