5 things to know before putting in place an IT Support solution for your employees
- Decide whether to upgrade or replace
- Involve your team
- Understand the impact of adding a new solution
- Analyze your requirements
- Determine the effort required to implement
1 — Decide whether to upgrade or replace
Before you even think about replacing your internal help desk, you need to ask yourself two very important question: “have my needs changed and my existing software no longer a good fit. Consider the cloud. Have your organization changed?”
What about the role and responsibilities of your current IT Teams? Has things changed since you first deployed the ITSM solution?
Budget, of course, must be considered, but the question to upgrade or replace is about much more than just budget.
2 — Involve your team
This is so obvious that some companies tend to forget this step.
Avoid the trap of excluding end users from the selection process; their knowledge is essential. Moreover, if they’re not involved, they may rebel, refusing to use the new solution and leading to eventual failure.
The new IT support solution can easily become THEIR tool rather than OUR solution. Watch out however, as it is also dangerous to go too far the other way and suffer delays caused by too much involvement.
In the end getting early buy-ins will facilitate adoption and change management.
3 — Understand the impact of adding a new solution
Implementing a new software involves putting a project team in place, training, communication and change management. Poor project management is often costly for companies.
As an example, inefficient communication and poor collaboration costs, in the UK alone, companies $10,000 per employee, every year, according to a new report by enterprise communications company Mitel. That means that a business with 500 employees or more could be losing more than $5 million every year.
4 — Analyze your requirements
When selecting an IT Support solution for your employees try to look at your requirements with a fresh eye.
Ask yourself the following questions:
Am I making it easier for my customer to contact me than I do for my own employees? What are my current workflows and processes really adding to the issue resolution experience?
Is my current process streamlining the IT Team workload or just adding to it?
Where are employees and how do I help them reach me when they need IT support.
How can you make IT support more collaborative and how can I make sure knowledge is shared among the IT support team?
Make sure your solution meets your requirements. Too many features may overwhelm your users while a limited solution will quickly be restricting
Keep in mind that in today’s workforce employees are looking at replicating experience they have in their personal life. In fact, many organizations are letting employees work on their own devices. People, especially millennials, are looking for easy communication channels (like messaging apps) and immediate feedback. Can your future IT support solution cater this need?
5 — Determine the effort required to implement
This is really where the hard work begins, as well as where things can start to fall apart. How quickly can you get up and running with your new IT Support solution for your employees and start to see a positive employee feedback? Ask the vendors you’re evaluating about possible roadblocks that could delay a ‘go live’ date, and ask what they would do to avoid this.
Now, as you might imagine, not every implementation goes smoothly.
Here are five common reasons a software implementation fails:
- Lack of leadership or sponsorship
- Poor communication plan
- No incentive plan — ‘carrot on a stick’
- Being a cowboy and trying to ‘do it alone’
- No definition of the business process
Now just imagine that the front end of your new IT Support solution were simple the collaboration platform your employees already use. Imagine that the employees could easily send their support requests from the channel of their choice (txt, live chat, email, Slack) and that a chatbot answered the most simple questions.
Now imagine that the bot can route all these employee issues to a single channel in your collaboration platform support team when unable to answer.
Finally, imagine that implementation is no longer an issue.
Imagine no more. This is what Talkus IT Support solution provides — a multi-channel help desk solution for your employees. Talkus has turned Slack into a modern collaborative support solution. Employees use the channel of their choice while support teams stay in Slack to handle all the issues. Talkus’ smart AI will backup your support team, providing quick resolution to the most requiring issues and questions. The Talkus Dashboard is the go to place for your support team to access their Inventory (for software tracking and maintenance renewals), knowledge base, and reporting tool.
Try Talkus for free for 14 days
These are the 5 things to know before putting in place an IT Support solution for your employees
- Decide whether to upgrade or replace
- Involve your team
- Understand the impact of adding a new solution
- Analyze your requirements
- Determine the effort required to implement
