When someone opens a ticket with your company’s IT helpdesk, how often do you click and immediately think “this issue, again?”
Compare notes with any other helpdesk provider and you’ll probably see some similarities! There are a handful of basic issues that end-users run into every day, but you shouldn’t write them off as inevitable! We asked our own IT helpdesk team about their most common calls, and they gave us some wisdom on how to stem the tide of issues early on, and empower your end-users to better manage these hiccups before they become ticketed IT problems.
“I need to reset my password”
Without a doubt, the most common problem users are calling in about is regarding password resets. This is especially common in organizations where users need to juggle multiple accounts. What’s worrisome is there are many bad “solutions” to this problem—keeping your password on a sticky note next to your computer, or putting your master password list in your wallet—not great!
Solution: Password Management Tool (Lastpass)
The biggest timesaving solution for your end-users is to get them comfortable with a password management tool—at Newmind Group, our preferred tool is Lastpass. It’s secure and it’s easy to manage and share access between individuals as well as organizational units. It’s a bit like that “master password list in your wallet” idea, except all of your credentials are under lock and key at Lastpass—you only need one master password, made even more secure by two-step authentication.
“I lost my shared drive”
On the chance that your IT is working with a shared drives, you’ve probably had this scenario unfold before: one day, your users might come in, and that drive will simply be gone, even though they had it just yesterday. This leaves users disabled, and you and IT are left mapping the drive back through the network.
Solution: Cloud Based Storage (Google Drive)
Our prevention strategy here is simple: use cloud-based storage! It’s more stable, and oftentimes it’s easier on your budget (especially smaller businesses). The best tool for this scenario is a live cloud-based data management solution, like Google Drive. This is also a great solution for organizations using Microsoft Exchange to manage emails—when you have issues, you’ll need to connect to a server and troubleshoot for a specific user. With Google’s data management tools, problems are rare, and if anything happens, it’s most likely affecting the whole platform—and those issues are are few and far between with Google’s 99.99% uptime (and yes, you can work on those files without an internet connection).
“My phone won’t dial out”
A few of our clients used large, server-based phone systems, which fail often. Because they’re entirely located within their organizations, all it takes is a hardware issue or a missed system update for users to run into issues with incoming and outgoing calls—managing a system like this takes staff with a lot of expertise and (even more important) lots of time.
Solution: Cloud-based solution for phone system
Cloud-based solutions are a lower maintenance, more integrated, and often more affordable option for phones. They relieve you the burdens of hardware and troubleshooting (servers aren’t cheap, and maintaining them takes time), and they can easily integrate with mobile phones. On top of that, many preferences can be managed by users directly, rather than every user needing to go through IT.
Why all the cloud love?
For us, it comes down to two huge benefits: cost and stability.
Costs are generally going to be lower—both up-front and recurring. You aren’t buying hardware, you don’t have to maintain the server, and you don’t need to give up manpower to attend to the server.
Stability is the next benefit. When you aren’t maintaining the tools in-house, they’re a lot less likely to go down—and on the occurrence that something does go wrong, it’s usually resolved quickly, depending on the solution. We haven’t had 100% perfect experience with any of the cloud-based solutions we’ve worked with, but the fail rate is significantly lower.
Could your helpdesk use some extra bandwidth? You should check out our post, 3 ways a managed services provider will increase the value of your IT team! If you’re looking for solutions for communication and mobility solutions, check out our service page and drop us a line.
