How and why to use Microsoft Teams as a help desk with Halp

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Using Microsoft Teams as a help desk allows employees to get support without ever leaving the app they already use to collaborate, chat,  and do video calls. This makes the entire process much more efficient from the initial report through the issue’s resolution. If your team is using Microsoft Teams or considering using it, creating a smooth help desk experience directly in Teams will level up your entire company. 

Why using Microsoft Teams as a help desk can benefit your business

If employees in your company use Microsoft Teams to communicate, asking them to switch to different software whenever there’s an issue can be inconvenient. It requires spending time changing from one app to another, and often having to train the staff on how to use an additional piece of software. 

Why all that hassle when your help desk can live right within Microsoft Teams?  If employees already use it to talk to each other, it’s a natural experience to use it to raise issues there as well. On the other side of the problem, the IT and Operations teams will get a queue of tickets they can organize, prioritize and resolve, instead of a chaotic flow of requests coming in from different sources.

It works for organizations of any size

Microsoft Teams is used by small companies as well as organizations with thousands or even tens of thousands of employees. Companies of every size need a help desk to quickly resolve issues. 

If you’re a small company, setting up a help desk in Teams takes only a few minutes, and is a huge improvement over no tracking at all. 

If you’re a large organization, implementation still takes only a few days or weeks at the most, and the resulting productivity improvement across the company is enormous. 

It requires no training and just works

Employees have already learned how to use Microsoft Teams. When rolling out a help desk in Teams, you won’t need to spend time training employees, which makes the transition much more straightforward than setting up separate systems.

The same holds true for your IT and Operations teams. Help desk teams using Microsoft Teams will feel right at home. They also have the ability to resolve things quickly because they can quickly get context and access knowledge inside Teams, reducing the time it takes to get back to the person asking for help. 

It’s conversational and human

Internal help desk tickets are naturally conversations between coworkers. Unlike traditional customer support, in an internal help desk there is a much closer relationship between the end-user and the support agent. 

That’s why Microsoft Teams is such a natural place to create and respond to a help desk ticket. It’s a free flowing, conversational experience that highlights the human element. Interacting with a help desk ticket in Teams ensures that employees feel like they are talking to a coworker, not a nameless service agent. 

How Microsoft Teams can be used as a help desk

Setting up a help desk in Microsoft Teams is simple, but there are a few key steps you need to take. 

Make it easy to create tickets from public channels and direct messages with a bot 

The most important piece of the puzzle is making it incredibly easy to create a ticket in Microsoft Teams. There are two primary places where this needs to be able to happen.

1. From a public channel. It’s best to name these channels #help-it, #help-security, #help-finance, etc. 
2. In a direct message with a bot. 

If you want to get up and running quickly, Halp makes it easy to create tickets from channels as well as in direct messages. Alternatively, you could build your own custom bot. 

Quickly triage and assign tickets to the right person

Now that you’ve made it easy to create a ticket in Teams, you need a way to manage and delegate those requests. 

One elegant solution is to create a separate Team that is specifically for triaging tickets. The members of this team would just be the Agents on the IT or Operations team in charge of answering tickets. 

Say a coworker contacts you via DM asking for help with the password reset for the CRM software. Then someone else needs a new battery for her mouse in the #help-it channel. Each of these requests would route to one triage team, which is like a virtual basket for all incoming requests.

Your help desk team can then review incoming tickets in the triage team and quickly claim new tickets directly in Microsoft Teams. That can be done by the responsible person or a person in charge of assigning tickets. Also, once the ticket is assigned to the right person, they can quickly ask for clarification without having to leave Teams.

Streamline your help desk workflow and reduce your response time

When the connection between your laptop and the screen isn’t working and you need to give an important presentation, you need help – fast. With Microsoft Teams, you can streamline the ticketing system at both ends. Both the requester and the help desk agent will benefit from using Microsoft Teams and resolving the ticket where they are already working.

‍Help desks in Microsoft Teams are efficient help desks

Being able to quickly deal with and resolve incoming issues is a trait of productive offices. Many times, however, help desk users have to switch back and forth between systems, which can cause delays.

Using Microsoft Teams as a help desk is a win-win because it streamlines all tickets in one central place. It also centralizes the queue of tickets so they can be organized, ranked, resolved, and reported on.

No matter the size of your company, using Microsoft Teams as a help desk is a smart solution, with a tool like Halp, or by building your own bot. Use it to cut response time, better organize incoming requests, and answer common questions automatically.

Install Halp today or join us for a demo of Halp to learn how you can start using MS Teams as a help desk.

[Emmanuel JK Gbordzor]

Interesting read.

[Edu Verde]

I'm in!

[Veronique DUFOUR]

That is interesting !

[JayDee]

I find this to be very interesting, it may solve a problem I have been tasked with.