4 Challenges of IT Service Managers in a Digital World

How To Improve the IT Services of Your Business

This year’s Service Desk & IT Support Show (SITS) is just around the corner. It is a key event for professionals and businesses operating in the field of IT services and an innovative place where new tech trends for the Service Desk are being discussed. Over 60 ITSM vendors present their solutions on May 11th and 12th at the ExCeL in London. If you are an IT Service Manager hoping to gain new ideas on how to streamline your business’ IT support, both in-house and externally, this event is for you.

The realm of IT Service Management does not focus on technology alone anymore. Technology is an important factor as digitization is transforming the world of IT faster than ever. But today, it’s mostly IT services that are being sold as products, and the focus lies on how technology can help to make these service operations more efficient.

When we think of customer support, for example, we often miss the fact that someone is pulling the strings in the backend so that frontend customer support can work properly. Consequently, IT Service Managers not only face the challenges of their customer service team, but they also need to make sure that the groundwork the frontend support operates on is functioning correctly and delivers a stable basis for efficient external and in-house workflows. That can be a lot to juggle with.

The good news is that IT Service Management doesn’t have to be a headache. In this blog post, we will identify the four main challenges IT Service Managers face when seeking to transform the IT service delivery of their business and offer practical tips on how to overcome these obstacles by building a proper ITSM framework.

Challenge No. 1: Increasing Efficiency and Performance of Your IT Support

Efficient IT support is characterized by a high level of customer-centricity. In an ideal scenario, support teams are capable of:

• Quick problem management
• Troubleshooting easily across devices and operating systems
• Delivering an excellent quality of services
• Increasing customer retention

What can IT Service Managers do to provide a proper framework for their support team, so that the ideal scenario doesn’t just remain wishful thinking? How can they assure that their front-end customer service is flexible enough to handle all service requests without having to cut back on efficiency and performance? The answer is simple: Provide your support team with effective remote software that can cover all use cases your business is operating – from Remote Support to Remote Work and Remote Access and Control. If all these scenarios are covered by just one product, your support team can work flexibly and efficiently.

Remote Technology has facilitated the way we provide support to customers and revolutionized the way we work. Needless to say, this technology saves your business money as it can combine most major use cases and secures business continuity, no matter the external circumstances.

We recommend a Remote Desktop Software that is fast and stable, can operate fluently at low bandwidths, and includes Mobile Device Management to ensure cross-platform compatibility. This is not just important for support specialists but also for IT admins internally managing entire departments which most often use different kinds of devices across teams.

Challenge No. 2: Finding the Right Tools to Simplify and Modernize IT Processes

Extended and complicated processes can drain the productivity of an IT department that needs to react quickly when problems occur. Neither customers nor employees want to wait several days for an issue to be fixed. A short reaction period is the basis of good technical support, externally as well as in-house. But how can businesses assure that the software they roll out reflects simplicity and a modern mindset? And what additional services could revolutionize the Service Desk and create more time for IT staff to focus on the important tasks?

Simple tools are saving support teams a tremendous amount of time and frustration as employees don’t have to waste time navigating through cluttered software modules. They can help to speed up the services support teams deliver to their customers, leading to higher customer satisfaction in the long run. To simplify processes, Remote Desktop Software should possess the following innovative qualities:

• An intuitive user interface
• Easy usage for both, support staff and IT administrators
• Clear design to avoid time loss
• Easily accessible features

Additionally, Self-Services, such as Self-Service-Portals or Help Centers, are a great way to modernize and complement a customer support strategy. We live in a fast-paced, modern world in which information needs to be available 24/7. Therefore, customers also expect services to be available around the clock.

Businesses that can serve this demand and are eager to modernize their IT services virtually, will eventually win the race. To gain more exclusive insights into the big potential of Self-Services, we recommend our blog post The Evolution of Customer Service.

Challenge No. 3: Expanding Administrative and Customizable Capabilities Across Departments

The bigger the company, the more complex the IT administration behind it. This statement seems plausible at first glance, but with the right tools at hand, administration doesn’t have to be a pain, regardless of the size of a business. With companies steadily growing and employees coming and going, businesses need a software solution that allows configuration management and advanced customization on all levels to finetune features to the individual needs of the business or department. For IT Service Managers, the goal should be to expand administration and customization to all service departments, not just to frontend customer support.

Software solutions that come with additional customization and administration capabilities enable IT administrators to restrict access for individuals, for instance, as not every employee requires all rights available. Security poses the greatest risk for IT businesses nowadays, not just from external sources but also from within. A customizable admin software can support your in-house IT to tackle these security challenges. A customer support clerk that helps customers externally does not need the same level of permissions as his in-house counterpart or an administrator who requires deep privileges to assign permissions to users.

Assigning rights can be automated and doesn’t necessarily steal any time or effort. A secure Remote Software allows admins to pre-configure clients before roll-out and set permissions via Group Policies from one central place, for example. With Group Policies, users can be bundled up in different groups, and the settings for these groups can be changed with one click rather than for each user individually.

A new employee has just started in customer support? With the right IT administration software, you can simply assign him to the correct group that already has pre-set all necessary permissions your new employee needs to accomplish his job. If your IT administration runs smoothly, so will your front-end customer support. Both should be synched with each other so your business can leverage its full potential.

Challenge No. 4: Meeting Employee and Customer Expectations

Your role as an IT Service Manager entails that you seek to continuously improve the efficiency and performance of your service teams. You aim to achieve the best possible customer retention because customer satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) can either make or break a business. It is important, however, that not only customer needs are being met. Employees are an important asset, too, especially in the field of IT services, where it’s about technological know-how and empathy. Catering to the needs of both, customers and staff, is the key to success.

We recommend that IT Service Managers use the following strategies to bind customers to their brand long-term:

• Implementation of Professional Services and Customer Success Teams
• Accompanying the entire customer journey and not just the initial onboarding phase
• Onboarding customers to ensure that they get the best out of a product or service
• Being flexible enough to react to the changing needs of your customers’ businesses

Particularly onboarding shouldn’t be reserved for customers only. Managers should ensure that their employees are properly onboarded as well. Only if service teams fully know how to use a Remote Support Solution correctly, will they be able to leverage the software to its full potential (this counts for external customer support and in-house support). Proper onboarding will eventually lead to less frustration among staff as they will feel well prepared for the job instead of lost and thrown in at the deep end.

It’s the efficiency and performance of the Service Desk that indicate how satisfied employees really are, which eventually all ties back to you and how service departments are being managed.

See You at SITS!

If you are an IT Service Manager or an IT leader, chances are that some of these challenges have caused you headaches in the past. Is your customer support department too slow? How easy is the IT administration of your business really? And how big is your customer/employee churn? No matter where your problem is rooted, the good news is that there is a solution for everything. Revise your current strategies and systems in place as it might be time for an overhaul.

To stand out from your competition, you need to think outside the box, modernize your service strategy, and invest in new technologies. A flexible Remote Desktop Tool will help you tackle the above-mentioned obstacles. If the software is customizable and offers a wide range of administration options, it will facilitate internal as well as external workflows. With the right software solution, you will be able to improve and simplify your IT services while increasing the efficiency and performance of your support team at the same time.

Interested in diving deeper into the topic? Want to learn how to improve the quality of your Service Desk? Or are you already looking for a new Remote Desktop Solution for your business to streamline your IT support, externally as well as in-house? Request your appointment with us at the Service Desk & IT Support Show and meet us on May 11th and 12th at the ExCeL in London! AnyDesk is looking forward to helping you tackle your challenges. We are excited to see you there!