How an internal help desk can help efficiency skyrocket

Imagine a tool that acts as a central hub of your company’s ecosystem, connecting departments, managing requests, and ensuring that nothing slips through the cracks. Just like a well-organized transportation network keeps a city moving smoothly, an efficient help desk ensures that every team has the resources and support they need to stay productive and on track.

An internal help desk plays a pivotal role in creating seamless and productive workplace operations for IT, HR, and admin teams. With the right system in place, your team can collaborate more efficiently, solve problems faster, and achieve greater productivity.

In the following sections, we’ll explore how certain features can be leveraged to optimize your company’s internal help desk.

Understanding the internal help desk

What is an internal help desk?

An internal help desk is the go-to hub where IT, HR, and admin teams can tackle employee requests and solve problems quickly and efficiently.

The primary functions of an internal help desk include:

Centralized support system: Providing a single point of contact for employee needs, the internal help desk streamlines the support process, ensuring consistency and efficiency in handling support requests.

Issue tracking and management: By systematically logging and tracking support tickets, the internal help desk enables IT, HR, or admin staff to prioritize and address issues in a timely manner, improving response times and resolution rates.

Communication and collaboration: An internal help desk facilitates communication between employees and internal-facing teams like IT or HR. It fosters collaboration and ensures clear and effective exchange of information throughout the support process.

Why use an internal help desk?

Without an internal help desk, inefficient communication happens between employees and IT, HR, and admin teams, including lots of back and forth and follow up on requests. Employees may try to solve issues on their own with ad hoc solutions because the process of working with these teams is inefficient, with requests sometimes slipping through the cracks.

Organizations that implement an internal help desk can reap numerous benefits, including:

Enhanced productivity: Through quick and effective resolution of issues, efficient internal help desk processes allow employees more time to focus on their core responsibilities and tasks. 

Efficient communication and cost savings: Efficient communication around purchase decisions, team onboarding and training, and renewals enables companies to optimize their spend and make the most out of tools they purchase.

Employee satisfaction and retention: Responsive and efficient internal help desk services contribute to overall employee satisfaction — with quick replies, employees feel supported and empowered to perform their tasks effectively. High employee satisfaction boosts employee retention rates, helping organizations retain top talent and maintain a competitive edge in the market.

Core components of internal help desks

Here are some of the top features to look out for when selecting an internal help desk.

Streamlined request management: Streamlined issue management ensures every inquiry or issue receives prompt attention and resolution. 

While traditional ticketing systems are commonly used for this purpose, Front offers a unique approach. Its intuitive interface humanizes the ticket creation, tracking, and resolution process, ensuring employee requests are handled with care and attention. By centralizing all communication channels within Front’s omnichannel inbox, response times are significantly reduced, and communication between help desk agents and employees is streamlined. 

This seamless communication and efficient request management leads to increased productivity and reduced costs. Because issues are resolved swiftly, employees can remain focused on their tasks without long interruptions.

Automation and workflow customization: Automation and workflow customization can reduce easy inquiries and free up time for the team’s more difficult issues.

Front’s automation tools can handle routine inquiries, freeing up help desk agents to focus on more complex issues. Customizable workflows can be tailored to fit specific internal processes, ensuring efficiency and consistency in handling employee requests.

Front automation can help with seamless escalation and handoffs — automatically loop in the right team members based on keywords, customer data, and more. It helps with workload balancing, ensuring no teammate is overwhelmed when messages are distributed according to their capacity. 

Collaboration: The benefits of being able to collaborate on requests with other team members are endless. If there’s a scenario where two departments need to work on an issue together, the right collaboration features makes it easy to do so.

Front helps IT, HR, and admin teams work in sync to be more responsive and leave no messages behind. With Front, you can take the guesswork out of who’s following up with a clear owner for every conversation. You can quickly tag in teammates with in-thread comments, and you can share drafts for speedier responses to tickets. Front is built to keep teams in lockstep.

“Because Front’s shared inboxes are so collaborative, I never find myself sharing ticket numbers with other people when I ask them to look at a ticket. Instead, I just mention them into the conversation, and we collaborate directly there.” –Director of Corporate IT, B2B software company

Integrated knowledge base: IT, HR, and admin teams need an easily accessible knowledge base allowing employees to find quick solutions to common problems and thereby reducing request volume for the team. Front’s knowledge base details team processes, troubleshooting steps, and more to help teams handle inquiries at scale.

Analytics and reporting: You can’t improve what you can’t measure. 

Front provides insightful analytics and reports on help desk performance, including metrics like average response time, resolution rate, and employee satisfaction scores. Understanding these metrics will help make an IT team as efficient as possible as they’re able to look back quarter-on-quarter to improve metrics and performance.

Artificial intelligence capabilities: Every team is looking for ways to do more with less.

Front’s AI capabilities help resolve inquiries instantly and boost team efficiency. From email thread summarization to magic compose (AI-generated drafts), AI can help teams resolve tickets in record time. 

Internal help desk challenges 

Common challenges teams face with internal help desks 

Teams using Internal help desk systems might encounter several challenges in their day-to-day operations. These include:

Managing high request volumes: HR and IT teams often grapple with a high volume of incoming tickets, some simple inquiries and others complex technical issues. Handling this influx of tickets efficiently while ensuring no request goes unnoticed can strain resources and lead to delays in response times.

Ensuring timely responses: With many requests to address, teams may struggle to provide timely responses to employee inquiries. Delays in response times can frustrate employees and hinder productivity.

Maintaining high-resolution rates: Achieving fast resolution rates consistently can be challenging, especially when dealing with complex technical issues that require specialized expertise or coordination with other teams.

Front offers a comprehensive solution to transform these challenges into opportunities for efficiency and employee engagement. Its intuitive interface and automation tools streamline request management processes, helping teams handle high volume with ease. 

Front offers templates and collaborative drafting to ensure responses are personalized and tailored to the unique needs of each employee. Its collaborative interface enables teams to work together on complex issues with features like shared inboxes, internal comments, and real-time notifications to stay informed and coordinated. 

Enhancing employee experience with Front 

Front can lead to higher employee satisfaction and productivity. Front is a well-established help desk market leader and has all of the building blocks your internal team needs to collaborate efficiently and provide an optimal experience to employees. It’s worth it to invest in the right technology — strong team support is critical to fostering team productivity, reducing downtime, and maintaining a positive company culture. 

Explore Front’s solutions further and consider how they could transform your team into a collaborative, efficient IT powerhouse.

Experience the difference with Front’s help desk.