The holiday season is upon us and now is a great time to show your tech support staff your appreciation. Your team has proven their value, and in many cases the IT service desk became the backbone of keeping operations on track during Covid-19 disruptions. All of this on top of the fact that the agents have likely worked through some degree of personal stress and anxieties due to the pandemic. In fact, according to a survey conducted by ITSM.tools, 58% of respondents reported that their work is adversely affecting their personal wellbeing – which is about three out of every five employees.
With that in mind, why not give your team a little something extra to show your appreciation this holiday season?
5 Gifts to Give Your IT Service Desk for the Holidays
The thing about gift-giving is that you want to give your team something that will benefit them long after the holiday season. We’re not talking about trinkets or company swag – this is more of a call for structural change that will benefit the entire organization. You can start with the following five gifts:
1. The gift of better tools
Employees need tools at work that make their lives easier. And as millennials and Gen-Z are taking over the workforce, they expect the same level of ease in their software and tools in their professional lives as they get in their personal lives.
Yet despite this push for easy, user-friendly tools in the workplace, 22% of employees don’t like their company’s tools according to a recent survey. These tools range from ITSM software to self-service portals and beyond.
Switching tools, especially ITSM vendors, is much easier said than done of course, and will take several considerations from implementation time to training agents on how to use the tools. But, finding an ITSM solution with a wide range of capabilities can greatly improve employee satisfaction and empower both agents and customers to solve problems and incidents more quickly and easily.
You can read about these tools in our new eBook, Blueprint for Proactive IT Service Delivery & Support.
2. Flexibility in the new year
When your service desk is already overworked, it’s hard to imagine how you can offer flexibility, but hear us out: supporting your employees directly translates to supporting your customers. Further, flexibility is something employees want, with 94% of employees in a survey published by Forbes answering that they would benefit from a more flexible environment.
The goal of flexibility is to help team members achieve a better balance in their personal lives while helping them excel in their career. Creating a supportive environment that treats your team with kindness and humanity can not only give you an edge with handling tickets but will also serve to help you continually recruit top talent.
Flexibility can look like a remote or hybrid workforce, or maybe for your team it looks like creating more flexible scheduling options. It can also look like flexibility in the types of tickets each team member works on, allowing some movement and room to grow within the team. Further, you can give some flexibility to complete training sessions on new and emerging technologies and tools.
3. Self-Service Support
Self-service support is a gift to not only your service desk team but to customers of the service desk as well. Self-service support can provide guided answers and solutions to everyone, effectively relieving some of the pressure off of the service desk team by equipping employees to solve their own problems and creating faster onboarding for new service desk agents.
Self-service support can be a lengthy project to roll out, and it’s important to make sure the data you are using is correct and thorough – which some might argue creates more work for the service desk rather than less. However, in the long run you can see several benefits from self-service support. Check out our new eBook to learn about some of the benefits and pit-falls of self-service support.
4. An AI co-worker
When people hear about AI, they tend to think it means they will be replaced. But, an AI coworker can actually help to augment and improve the employee and service desk agent experience. This AI can be in the form of a chatbot or automation (like automated workflows).
It should be noted, AI shouldn’t take the focus off human interactions but offer more channels for users to find answers in order to take the pressure off of the service desk agents. A great AI in the form of a chatbot or virtual agent can also help service desk agents find answers quickly as well. Think of it like hiring a 24/7 team member who everyone goes to for answers.
5. A renewed focus on employee and customer needs
It’s easy to get caught in the day-to-day operations of the service desk and forget that your agents and customers have specific pain points and needs. But, by renewing your focus on customers and employee satisfaction, you’ll see effects will last long after the holidays.
Think about the people you’re serving but also about those who are providing the service. Consider the problems they face on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis and how those problems impact more than just the business but how they impact the people personally as well. Then, work to think of solutions for those needs.
Find out how EasyVista can help you find the best gifts for your service desk and get a demo today!
