Computers, smartphones, printers, and a huge range of other digital devices are crucial to the operation of modern businesses. Employees have to interact with these tools each and every day, and seemingly small problems can often result in big delays and other issues for your team. This makes an in-house support team vital to companies that have large numbers of employees. But how exactly should something like this be managed? Let’s take a look at some of the tools and systems that can be put into place to ensure that your tech support runs flawlessly for your team.
Disaster Prevention
Internal tech support is about more than simply solving problems as they arise. It’s important to make sure that your team is able to operate effectively when issues occur, while also working hard to prevent issues in the first place. This can turn something that has the potential to be a disaster for a business into something that barely disrupts the day.
- Training: Training is one of the most crucial tools in a business, giving you the chance to give your team the knowledge they need to avoid disasters. Training to avoid malware, phishing, and hardware problems is part of this, and this is something that can make life much easier for your support team.
- Redundancy: While fixing machines as they break down is a good way to save money in the long run, this can leave your employees without the tools they need for extended periods. Having redundancy measures in place means that you always have extra computers and other tools for when your regular ones have problems and can be a great way to solve issues before they hurt your business.
A Robust Support System
IT and other tech support are only useful when your team has easy access to them and they are able to run efficiently. This can be harder than it sounds to master, but you can find some tips below that will make it possible to build an extremely robust support system for your employees.
- Support Experts: The people you choose to support your employees should be experts in their fields. It always makes sense to have different support team members to handle different jobs, like network management, hardware problems, and malware/viruses. This can be expensive, but the next tip can help you with this.
- Outsource Complex Tasks: While it makes sense to have dedicated team members in place for issues that could occur each day, there will always be tech problems that need a different approach. Using third-party companies can be a great way to support these areas, enabling you to save money while still getting fast support.
- Monitor Performance: It can be hard to tell how well a tech support team is doing, especially if you don’t understand their work. Measuring performance can help with this, giving you the chance to spot weak points in your system and make sure that you are actively working to improve them.
Building Your Support System
Thanks to the ubiquity of internal business tech support systems, these sorts of operations are very well documented. This enables you to learn from other businesses when you want to build one for yourself, using the methods that have been proven to be successful in the past. Of course, though, you also have to think about the way that your business operates as you do this.
- Ticketing Systems: Ticketing is a great way to create a traceable support system that makes it possible to see exactly how each of your support cases is progressing. Using a ticketing system will make it much easier to ensure that your support team is working hard, while also giving your regular team members the ability to request help.
- Integrated Systems: With so many companies using tools like Microsoft Teams and Google GSuite, it often makes sense to integrate your support into these systems. Teams Ticketing can make it much easier for your employees to request support, while also saving you from investing in new systems entirely.
- Remote Access: Having the power to remotely access each of the machines in your company can be extremely useful for tech support. Many issues don’t require physical intervention, enabling the support experts to quickly respond to issues and have them fixed without forcing your employees to leave their desks.
- Access To Tools: There are a lot of tools on the market that can make life easier for support teams. Physical tools are a big part of this, but you also need to consider the software that they use. Burning a new disk image, for example, can take a long time in Windows, but will be much faster with dedicated software.
- Spare Parts: Fixing hardware issues is always much easier when spare parts are already available. Tools like computers and smartphones have common failure points, hard drives and screens respectively, and this makes it possible to keep a stock of spares that will get your employees back to work much faster when something goes wrong.
- Talk To Your Experts: The tech support experts that you have working for you will always know more about their needs than you do. Talking to your support team is the best way to make sure that they have what they need to work effectively, but you have to be open to investing in their needs to make this work out.
As you can see, it can take quite a lot of work to build a support team that works for your business. Many companies rely entirely on third-party services for this, only to find that this makes it much harder to keep their team working. A dedicated team will always improve your tech support services, but you need to make sure that you are operating this properly to make sure that it is effective.