How Can A Service Desk Be Managed With Microsoft Teams?

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 which 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.
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• MS teams​ allows a wide range of 3​rd​ party apps that integrate into Teams.
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• This ensures that users will never have to leave the​ MS Teams​ app to get their work done.
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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.
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• This channel only contains conversations, meetings, and documents related to the topic of that specific channel.
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• 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.
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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.
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• 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.
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• By having the meetings visible to everyone in the channel Organizations can increase transparency.
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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.
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• 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.
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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.
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• 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.
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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
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• 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.
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• By integrating a capability of ​the Service Desk​ such as IncidentManagement into​ MS Teams​, this bridges the gap between IT ​ServiceDesk​ teams and end-users/customers.
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2) Incident management is just a tab away

• Incident Management ​enables technicians and end-users to perform a host of request management activities, including:
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• Picking up incidents or assigning them to other technicians.
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• Conducting remote sessions or meetings with end-users through ​Microsoft Teams ​to diagnose incidents/issues.○Resolving issues reported by end-users and closing requests.
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• Tracking the status of User Requests with updates and notifications without any delay.
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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.
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• 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:
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• Tagging relevant and necessary ​Service Desk​ members to get them working on the tasks when such incidents arise.
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• 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.
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• Searching and updating the end-user whenever solutions comethrough.
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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​.
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• The built-in ​MS Teams​ Chatbot enables seamless interaction with the ​Service Desk​ team.
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• This enables the fetching of information and performing of the various service desk actions right from within ​MS Teams ​for quicker resolution of tickets.
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• 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.
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