With the start of 2025, now is the perfect time to make a fresh (or renewed) commitment toward incremental improvements to your support infrastructure. Here are a few to put on your list:
Invest in upgrading your self-service portal
In this self-service age, many of our customers prefer the ease and convenience of seeking solutions to their technology issues and needs through self-service. Anyone who interacts regularly with Gen-Z or Gen-Alpha can readily tell you that having to place or receive a phone call is to be avoided at all costs!
While our respective organizations may vary greatly in the availability, usability and maturity of our self-service portals, it’s essential that for today’s user experience, the portal have an intuitive design, robust search functionality and that it provides the ability to easily track the status of submitted requests or tickets. In years past, these features were “nice to have,” but today's customers (our consumers) demand this experience at a minimum.
Goal recommendation: Take stock of customer feedback regarding their experience with your self-service portal. Plan to make at least a few improvements this year to keep pace with evolving customer needs.
Resolve to invest in “technology onboarding” for new employees
Most organizations provide some form of onboarding training for new employees. This training usually gives a level set to the new employees regarding organizational/cultural norms. The benefit of this training is that the new employee is afforded the ability to begin working productively, without becoming lost in the new facility and company culture that they are now a part of.
Sadly, many organizations do not consider the long-term productivity benefits to be gained by investing in a technology onboarding program for new employees. Investing just a few resources into ensuring that new employees are trained on ubiquitous IT user functions can save countless calls to your Service Desk.
Goal recommendation: Reach out to your HR team to investigate the possibility of providing technology-specific training for new employees. If you already have a technology training program in place, consider program enhancements for 2025.
Resolve to invest in more peer collaboration
Be intentional about creating and participating in cross-functional peer collaboration efforts to solve customer-impacting issues. IT Deskside Support teams, Infrastructure support teams, Application Support teams and Security teams share many of the same frustrations whether we realize it or not. Rapidly evolving technologies, deploying new tools and applications, deploying new infrastructure, driving user adoption, and combating cybersecurity threats are to name but a few.
While it’s often in our nature to withdraw into our team silos while combating the aforementioned challenges in their many forms, we lose sight of the proven benefits of working collaboratively to find solutions, such as: increased innovative thinking, greater IT employee engagement, and the ability to tackle issues from a broader perspective due to the diversity of expertise on the cross-functional team.
Goal recommendation: Reach out to your peer IT team leaders of different disciplines in 2025 to discuss common challenges and common opportunities for your teams. Make a plan/goal to collaborate cross-functionally over the coming months to find solutions to common issues and to set forward-facing goals for the coming years.