Help Desk for Enterprise: A Brief Outline
- Time: from 2—4 weeks to launch an outsourced help desk.
- Team: support agents, a team lead, a project manager, a system administrator.
- Cost: if outsourced, $6—$13 per L1 ticket and $22—$28 per L2 ticket. Use our free online calculator to get a ballpark estimate for your case.
Table of Contents
Enterprise Help Desk Setup Plan
An enterprise help desk is a way to efficiently resolve IT-related issues and requests of end users. The paths to achieving this efficiency are unique to every enterprise. They depend on the organization’s needs, the IT infrastructure complexity, the chosen sourcing model, and many other factors. Outlines four general steps to establishing a robust help desk. Each step can be adjusted to your specific needs.
Step 1. Planning
The basis of an efficient help desk is a thorough analysis of your needs. Determine the expected:
- Types of users to support (in-house employees, customers, or both).
- Requests volume and urgency.
- Level of support (L1, L2, L3).
- Challenges your help desk is bound to resolve (a difficult-to-navigate IT system, low user satisfaction rate, decreased employees’ productivity, etc.).
Other key steps at the planning stage:
- Estimating the help desk budget.
- Choosing a sourcing model (in-house vs. outsourced).
- Creating a risk management plan (e.g., defining actions to take if the number of tickets exceeds the expected volume, hardware or software fails, your in-house support agents churn quickly).
Step 2. Design
- Outlining help desk operating procedures, including the instructions for ticket resolution and the process of ticket triaging or escalation.
- Identifying KPIs to monitor.
Sample KPIs tracks
- Determining must-have and desired help desk functionality (based on the elicited needs).
Step 3. Choosing a sourcing model
For an in-house help desk
If you establish an in-house help desk, you need to organize the whole workflow from scratch.
3.1 Tool selection and customization
Selecting a help desk tool that suits the business requirements defined during the previous stage.
3.2 Hiring and training help desk staff
Hire support agents with strong interpersonal skills and proficiency in your users’ languages. To cut training time, give priority to the candidates who have experience with the chosen help desk platform.
Prepare comprehensive training materials for support agents. Before starting, they need to have a solid understanding of:
- Support procedures (ticketing system usage, resolution of various types of support requests, escalation procedures, communication protocols with end users, etc.).
- Knowledge base (its effective usage and maintenance).
- Security (your company’s security protocols, ways of maintaining end users’ privacy, etc.).
For an outsourced help desk
3.1 Vendor selection
With so many help desk providers on the market, we recommend you pay attention to the provider that has:
- Proven experience in long-term help desk service delivery.
- Flexible service packages and pricing models.
- Support agents with tech background.
- Expertise in a wide range of tools and platforms.
- Willingness to create a vendor-neutral knowledge base.
Help Desk Service Options
Help desk outsourcing
Instantly access a help desk team with the following features:
- Flexible coverage options (24/7, 12/7, 12/5, or 8/5).
- Up and down scalability.
- L1, L2, and L3 support levels.
- Proficiency in English, German, Spanish, Turkish, etc.
Help desk consulting
Get expert help with:
- Help desk feasibility study (ROI, TCO, workflow analysis, etc.).
- Help desk design and planning (KPIs, team roles, communication channels, etc.).
- Selection of fitting help desk tools.
Typical Roles on Mille Solutions Help Desk Teams
L1 engineer
- Processes and categorizes user issues and requests incoming via calls, emails, social media platforms, etc.
- Creates tickets for every issue and elicits necessary details from users.
- Resolves common user-side issues and requests and basic hardware issues.
- Triages and escalates complex tickets to L2 and L3 support teams.
L2 engineer
- Processes and categorizes the tickets escalated from L1 and incoming directly.
- Resolves complex issues like multi-factor authentication management, app configuration, software incompatibility with a current operating system, etc.
- Performs advanced software troubleshooting, monitors server infrastructure, manages updates and patches, etc.
- Escalates issues requiring code changes to L3.
L3 engineer
- Processes complex technical issues and requests for infrastructure changes.
- Allocates issues and requests to the right IT team (security, infrastructure, development, etc.).
- Resolves issues by changing the code, CI/CD implementation, cloud storage optimization, database configurations, etc.
