InvGate Blog

It’s never fun dealing with complaints and customer escalations, especially when things get heated or contentious. But it definitely helps if you employ a consistent approach that ups the likelihood of your complaint-handling success. Here are ten tips to help you handle your angry customers.  

Topics: IT support

Let’s face it. Everyone loves a superhero. The Avengers, Batman, even Mighty Mouse (or is this just me showing my age?). IT departments are generally sources of heroes – our IT heroes. We all know that one person who seems to singlehandedly save the world (or at least the business) day-in-day-out. That person who knows everything about the business and its systems and who isn’t fazed by anything.

Topics: IT support

A solid review cycle is an essential part of any IT practice – with IT organizations that review and improve their processes and practices more successful than those that are stuck in firefighting mode and/or are in no position other than to maintain the status quo. Reviewing the maturity of your IT service management (ITSM) practices means that you get to sense check what you’re doing day in, day out and to look at opportunities for improvement. To help, here are ten tips for conducting ITSM maturity assessments.

Topics: ITSM, Maturity Assessment

Aged tickets hurt IT service desks and their parent organizations. From the business’ perspective, employees struggling for much longer than is acceptable and potentially losing productivity. From an IT perspective, it not only means that we’re failing those we serve, we might also have significant issues with our operations. Hopefully, you found part one of this blog valuable and it’s given you a start on handling your aged tickets. Now, let’s roll up our sleeves and keep up the good work! To help, here are five more tips.

Topics: Help Desk

Let’s face it. We’ve all been there. Attending a service review with a customer only to be faced with an incident or request that should have been sorted out months (if not years) ago. Such “aged tickets” happen for a variety of reasons – complex systems, organizational change, or even plain old “not enough people on the IT service desk.” The reality is that these aged tickets hurt us. From the business’ perspective, they have people struggling for much longer than is acceptable and from an IT perspective it means that we “can’t see the forest for the trees.” To help, here are my first five of ten ways to overcome your aged ticket problem.

Topics: ticketing system, Help Desk, Ticket Management

As you might know, we’ve recently launched a major release for InvGate Service Desk 6.0, featuring a whole new UI for improved organization and tracking of help desk activities. But the ball keeps rolling and we continue to develop new improvements.

Topics: help desk, Service Desk Software, service desk software features, Help Desk, InvGate Service Desk, Service Catalog

Keeping your IT service desk analysts motivated can sometimes be a difficult job. Between the negativity of end-user complaints, the stream of incoming incidents, and the monotony of some service desk tasks, staff demotivation is not uncommon. Don’t worry though, gamification – which essentially consists of merging game mechanics and work – can help you to keep staff motivation levels up.   So, if you feel that your IT service desk analysts are demotivated (or heading that way), unhappy, or simply bored at work, then gamification could be just what you need to inject a bit of enjoyment and fun into their working day. Please read on to find out more.

Topics: Gamification, Service Desk

ITIL is the go-to framework for most organizations in an IT service management (ITSM) environment but just because something works doesn’t mean that it can’t be reviewed and improved on. Especially because business requirements change, as has ITIL in 2019. Here are five questions to ask yourself, and your organization, when you’re reviewing and refocusing your ITIL approach.

Topics: ITIL

Selecting a new IT service management (ITSM) tool is a major project (and a major investment). It’ll impact your IT service desk, your technical support teams, and your end-user community. To help, here are ten tips for picking the right ITSM tool. Tip #1: Figure out what you want Know your organization and plan accordingly. What will you need the tool to do? There’s a huge difference between just doing the basics of incident, request, and change management and implementing a complex set of ITSM practices. Do you want a CMDB? What about problem management? So many people say they want a tool to “do ITIL” but the reality is that only the most mature organizations will ever have the need for support for over thirty ITIL management practices. Also, understand your business and create a plan based on your reality – not what the ITIL textbook says or what ITSM tool vendors are trying to sell you.

Topics: ITSM, InvGate Service Desk