When you boil it down, an incident is essentially any issue users experience with the tools and technology they rely on daily to do their jobs. Incidents disrupt employee productivity and can impact IT service operations—especially if service desk technicians are managing incidents inefficiently.
Examples of incidents can include asset malfunction, network failure, or ’software incompatibilities. These types of issues can sometimes even escalate to a problem with a widespread impact on employees, business operations, and end-user experiences. As IT responsibilities continue to increase and support teams are still tied up with common, repeat incidents, it becomes crucial for organizations to have a sophisticated plan of action, advanced incident management tools, decision structures, and set of protocols to streamline and in some cases automate incident resolution processes.
Outlined below are five of the most common incidents service desk employees have to deal with and how service desk automations can help IT teams resolve them faster.
Teleconferencing Issues
Teleconferencing is a powerful and convenient technology that helps colleagues connect and collaborate; however, teleconferencing meetings sometimes experience integration and plugin issues. Fixing all these issues consumes time, efficiency, and resources. With a versatile ITSM solution, issues can be resolved efficiently. Support teams can provide self-service solutions articles through the employee service portal. If self-service won’t cut it, the service portal can provide a form employees can fill out and submit, with fields automatically populated with critical data like their device and what software they’re using.
Once submitted, this data can power behind-the-scenes workflow and ticket routing automations. Say you have a team member who is an expert on Microsoft applications, and an employee is having an issue with their Teams video calls. The service desk can automatically route the incident to the right technician—reducing delays due to manually routing or having to reroute that ticket. It can also eliminate the back-and-forth communication between IT and the employee to identify which version of the application is in use since the data can be automatically associated with the employee thanks to integrated IT asset management.
Application Performance Issues
Organizations use multiple applications to perform their daily activities. However, these applications may face downtime, performance issues, errors, and more. It becomes crucial for the teams to track and resolve incidents quickly and ensure smooth business operations. A service desk that integrates with IT monitoring tools can be a major time saver.
If an application is experiencing a performance issue, have it trigger an alert that generates an incident in the service desk automatically. This integration can boost visibility and streamline collaboration across teams within IT. It can also enable IT to be proactive in resolving an application performance issue before productivity takes a noticeable hit.
Password Reset Issues
One of the most common issues employees face in an organization is password reset. With multiple password requirements, it becomes difficult for employees to remember the passwords they’ve created. It not only consumes time to reset the password via the service technician’s incident queue but also increases the frustration levels of the employees due to the inevitable delay that comes with waiting for a response.
Having an automated password recovery process in the service desk can save time and drive greater efficiency for technicians and employees. If an employees submits a ticket for a password reset, the service desk can trigger an automated reply with instructions and a link to reset the password.
Email Service Issue
Emails are the primary source of communication in organizations. Email server outages can lead to substantial revenue losses and can impact the performance of overall business operations. Most organizations use network performance monitoring tools to track server issues and analyze and troubleshoot network errors and outages. Moreover, when these network monitoring tools send instant alerts, the service desk with advanced incident management automation capabilities automatically generates an incident ticket to address the outage quickly.
System Crash
System crash is one of the most common issues organizations face. Several factors contribute to a system crash, such as hardware conflict, software errors, malware, hard drive errors, device drivers, flaky memory, power supply, and several applications installed on the machine.
With remote control capabilities in the service desk, it becomes easier for support teams to guide end users and help their systems to recover. These remote sessions require access to the end user’s system to diagnose the issue in real time. With complete asset data integrated in the service desk, technicians can easily associate assets to incidents. This data can help IT support teams track a potentially troublesome asset, like a specific laptop model, that’s causing these system crashes for multiple employees. If similar incidents keep occurring, IT can use trend data to inform decisions on retiring problem assets and budget for procuring new assets. Having the data associated with the impact user also speeds up the resolution process by equipping IT with that information upfront.
How to Manage IT Incidents
To manage IT incidents effectively, it’s important for support teams to understand the data and its accuracy. However, how quickly teams can identify and analyze the underlying causes and take actions to restore services depends on the quality of the available data. Additionally, capturing periodic last-known-good IT configurations can also contribute to the incident resolution process.
One of the best ways to determine and manage incidents is incorporating an incident management service desk in your IT infrastructure. It not only simplifies the ticketing system but also automates IT incident management across the company.
How Can Incident Management Software Help?
An incident management system is a tool designed specifically to automate and speed up incident management processes. The tool can process and escalate tickets to IT managers for quick query resolution. It’s crucial for organizations to ensure IT functionality and security is up to date. It helps support teams identify, diagnose, and resolve issues quickly across the organization’s infrastructure. With a centralized incident management system, end users can easily get their queries resolved, while support teams can diagnose and manage issues quickly.
An IT service management solution with powerful incident management capabilities maximizes the efficiency of incident management processes. It offers a comprehensive and scalable solution to diagnose ticketing issues and support service management for organizations. The service desk helps visualize the entire incident management processes right from start to finish and provides precise incident response solutions.
How Does an Incident Management Solution Help in Resolving Incidents?
An incident management solution can help:
- Identify the active software and hardware assets in the organization
- Monitor multiple assets to collate crucial information such as application
performance, system logs, and more
- Perform root-cause analysis
- Escalate issues to relevant teams for quick resolution
- Offer centralized dashboards to provide clear visibility of the incident and responses
- Generate reports to review incidents effectively
- Maintain a knowledge base for future reference
Conclusion
Organizations can leverage automation to streamline incident management—saving employee’s time and minimizing disruptions. Using the right set of tools helps in tracking incidents and allows IT to maintain a centralized inventory of the assets. This enables support teams to identify, monitor, and resolve incidents quickly.
Investing in a cloud-based solution like SolarWinds® Service Desk with robust analytics, ITIL best practices, asset management, and SLA monitoring capabilities is a smart decision. It enables teams to resolve incidents in an acceptable amount of time. Teams can evaluate and discover the advanced features and functionalities of the tool with a free trial.