How Can a Service Desk be Managed With Microsoft Teams?

Note- This was 1st written at Rezolve.ai. The original author is Anantha.

Why is an IT Service Desk essential?

The ​IT Service Desk​ is the communications center and the operating arm of an Organization’s IT department. It is designed in such a way to ensure that all the operations are running smoothly. An ​IT Service Desk​ is a one-stop-shop that can handle everything from individual users’ technical problems to sweeping system outages, this acts as a ​Single Point of contact​ (SPOC) for IT users to seamlessly and easily interact with the IT branch of an Organization.

What are the capabilities of a Service Desk?

The capabilities of a ​Service Desk​ are listed below:

• Aligns IT and the business processes/departments
• Improves asset management in the Organization
• Enhances operational efficiency
• Decisions made are normally data-driven decisions

Why Microsoft Teams?

1) Increase in Productivity and enriched communication

• The Collaboration tools offered in Microsoft 365 can often leave users overwhelmed. ​MS Teams​ increases productivity by making all the collaborations offered such as– conversations, chats, online meetings, shared files, tasks, etc. available in one single app and interface.
• MS Teams​ allows a wide range of 3​rd​ party apps that integrate into Teams.
• This ensures that users will never have to leave the​ MS Teams​ app to get their work done.

2) Better focus on your work

• With ​MS Teams​, Organizations can easily focus their attention on work-related topics and prioritize time better. Instead of wasting time going through an inbox that contains messages from everyone about everything, ​MS Teams​ organizes and compartmentalizes information into channels and provides context to the information.
• This channel only contains conversations, meetings, and documents related to the topic of that specific channel.
• This ensures that users do not get stuck trying to clean up their inbox. Instead, they can focus their valuable attention and time on the channels where they actually work.

3) Increased transparency

• A big challenge that many Organizations face is keeping everyone in the loop and making sure everyone knows what is going on. WithMS Teams​, this is easily achieved.
• Users no longer have to worry about whom to put on cc in an email or whom to invite to a meeting. With ​MS Teams​, Users can post their messages in the relevant channel, @-mention the people you want to get notified, and leave it for everyone else to read if they want.
• By having the meetings visible to everyone in the channel Organizations can increase transparency.

4) Seamless move to a digital workplace

• Businesses are hugely benefited by moving to a digital workplace in the cloud. Since ​MS Teams​ is a fully cloud-based solution, the move to the cloud is found to be seamless.
• This ensures that users have access to information from anywhere on any device. When an organization makes use of the cloud, they can reap benefits from ​Big Data Processing​ and ​ArtificialIntelligence​ to work smarter.

5) New team members are quickly updated on the Organization’s methodologies

• Organizations have an agile workplace where they can easily source talent from anywhere in the world, so getting people quickly up to speed is imperative.
• With ​MS Teams​, this can easily be done and can get the new team members engaged in the teamwork — no matter where in the world they are located.

How can MS Teams be used to manage Service Desks?

1) MS Teams can be used as a hub for teamwork

• MS Teams​ aims to make collaboration easier in Organizations by creating a shared workspace where users chat, meet, share files, and access business apps as mentioned above
• However, to enable maximum efficiency of these digital workspaces, it’s important that IT and ​Service Desk ​teams are always on alert when issues arise among customers/users.
• By integrating the capability of ​the Service Desk​ such as IncidentManagement into​ MS Teams​, this bridges the gap between IT ​ServiceDesk​ teams and end-users/customers.

2) Incident management is just a tab away

Incident Management ​enables technicians and end-users to perform a host of request management activities, including:

• Picking up incidents or assigning them to other technicians.
• Conducting remote sessions or meetings with end-users through ​Microsoft Teams ​to diagnose incidents/issues.○Resolving issues reported by end-users and closing requests.
• Tracking the status of User Requests with updates and notifications without any delay.

3) Channeling major incident management

• When major incidents occur, handling of these incidents can be a challenge and could turn out disastrous if businesses do not know the status of such an incident.
• It’s important that any possible workarounds and solutions to these incidents are quickly and easily shared with end-users to avoid repetition of these incidents.

Service Desk​ teams can leverage conversations in​ MS Teams​ by:

• Tagging relevant and necessary ​Service Desk​ members to get them working on the tasks when such incidents arise.
• Posting regular updates about each incident to the members of a channel, including service desk teams and end-users to ensure no one is left out of the loop.
• Searching and updating the end-user whenever solutions come through.

4) Handling tickets through chatbots.

• In an organization, both the technicians and end-users need various kinds of information about their ​Service Desk​ tickets during the Ticket Life Cycle​
• The built-in ​MS Teams​ Chatbot enables seamless interaction with the ​Service Desk​ team.
• This enables the fetching of information and performing of the various service desk actions right from within ​MS Teams ​for quicker resolution of tickets.
• Another important aspect of ​MS Teams​ is that technicians can perform activities like adding notes, approving requests, picking up requests, assigning requests to technicians, and resolving tickets through the actionable cards within a single chat window.