To better understand the employee experience with internal help desk services, PeopleReign surveyed 1,000 people at organizations greater than 5,000 employees. The survey results are striking and offer food for thought for anyone working on or responsible for a corporate help desk (either an ITSM or a Human Resources (HR) help desk).
According to a survey by @peoplereign 53% of employees purposefully avoid the help desk, with another 8.5% using it grudgingly. See this & more insights here. #ServiceDesk #ITSM Click To Tweet53% of employees purposefully avoid the help desk, with another 8.5% using it grudgingly
More than half of employees think the help desk experience is so bad that they avoid it entirely! And having employees trying to solve their own HR and IT problems can lead to more issues and wasted time. Clearly, there is room for improvement here and a need to communicate internally when you change your approach.
What is the MOST frustrating thing about using your internal help desk?
The MOST frustrating thing about using the help desk is wait time. But “dumb chatbot” is not far behind. In better news, wrong answers accounted for only 10% of the frustration. But what if you could trim down that 10% even more with a system of intelligence, artificial intelligence (AI) that learns as it goes, and a virtual agent that passes all relevant end-user inputs on to the live agent? Such that no one has to start from scratch again when they move from AI to human help.
51% of the 1,000 people surveyed by @peoplereign said the most frustrating about the #helpdesk is wait times. Followed by 28.5% citing 'dumb' chatbots are their primary cause of frustration. #servicedesk #ITSM Click To Tweet
Over 40% of helpdesk requests aren’t answered for hours (or days!)
What would make employees’ help desk experiences better?
For our open text box question, “How could your help desk experience be improved?” we received an overwhelming number of variations on “Speed up wait times” and “make it easier to use.” As well as a few disheartening “a total revamping of everything” responses.
Other top contenders for improving the help desk experience included advice to have a better chatbot and hire more people — which is not as diametrically opposed as it might sound. By having a better virtual agent interface, staff would be freed up to answer more complex issues more quickly.
'Speed up wait times' & 'make it easier to use' were the most common responses to the question 'what would make your experience with the helpdesk better' according to a @peoplereign survey. #EX #HelpDesk #ServiceDesk #ITSM Click To TweetThere were also calls for help desk staff to be more patient and more readily available. Some employees also damned with faint praise: “It works about as well as it could.”
“Improve the language and learn from others” and pleas for better (longer) help desk opening hours point to the need for multiple language solutions and sophisticated AI that can answer routine questions 24/7.
Sample employee responses to “How could your help desk experience be improved?”
- “Speed up wait times”
- “It works about as well as it could”
- “By making it easier to use it”
- “Fewer auto-responses, more personalization”
- “I wish it could give immediate solutions for issues”
- “Data should be up to date”
- “The user interface can be more attractive”
- “The reply speed needs to be high”
- “Have an automated system that can immediately and correctly solve common troubleshooting problems”
- “To decrease the wait time and to give multiple solutions for a problem”
- “Clear and short answers”
- “Make it more user-friendly”
- “More self-service”
- “Quicker answers that are actually helpful for more complex questions”
- “A robust integration of the Help Desk Support with the various software platforms we use for work could make things easier”
- “Have more help desk operators
- “Make the chatbot more active”
- “More website concentration. That’s where I work, online.”
- “Better trained reps”
- “Instant response. No queue. Availability of experts.”
- “Limit the systems we have to access to solve the problem”
- “More streamlined and efficient ways of connecting me with the right person for my problem”
Employees indicate the need for both HR and IT support
Our survey findings make it clear that internal help desks have room for improvement. The good news? There are solutions out there for all the problems regarding the future of work. You can read the full report in PeopleReign’s resource section.
Catie Bull
Catie is a data-driven demand generation and marketing professional who has written articles on a wide range of topics for Chief Learning Officer, Training Industry, and other publications.
