For most large organizations an internal help desk is the epicenter for resolving employee queries. Without a proper system for solving employee issues or answering business-related questions in a timely manner, problems become bottlenecked, workers get stuck, and productivity takes a nosedive. This leads many organisations to allocate part of their budget to hiring external vendors to help the service desk teams to handle the high amount of tickets.

The system you develop can have a major impact on your organizational effectiveness. Misjudge it and business-critical problems may go unresolved for hours or even days at a time, with serious implications for your company’s overall productivity and employee satisfaction. 

Read on to find out how to optimize your internal service desk support management and – most important – reduce the number of tickets you have to deal with by equipping your employees to resolve issues and queries themselves.

What is an internal ticketing system?

An internal ticketing system is an application you can use to catalog, monitor, and manage all the requests and questions your employees need help with. More often than not, these questions will be related to IT. 

How do I add a printer to the network?
What are the VPN settings?
Where can I find the corporate Zoom backgrounds?
Why does my computer keep shutting down for no reason? 

However, your internal ticketing system should also be able to put requests into other, non-IT-related categories (such as admin or HR) to ensure issues are always dealt with by the right people.

Internal ticketing system and service desk best practices

The aim of an internal help desk is to resolve issues as quickly and efficiently as possible, so employees are able to get on with their work. Here’s how to ensure your internal support management system achieves that goal.

Automate repetitive questions

Manually managing support tasks is slow and prone to error. The more processes, you can automate the better. Most of the time the questions that come to an internal help desk are standard repeatable questions - questions asked over and over again by employees and new joiners. Increasingly, ticket systems also feature customizable chatbots and knowledge bases that can help employees self-resolve their issues.

Maximise service desk value

Not all help desk inquiries are created equal. At one end of the scale are trivial issues that can be fixed as and when. How do I change the background on my home screen? At the other end are problems that might put employees or even entire teams out of action or jeopardize a relationship with a high-value customer. Prioritizing the important requests is therefore essential, whether you do it by customer value, SLA target, criticality, or whatever method suits your business best.

Boost access to subject matter experts

Studies show that as long as response times are reasonable, people are usually happy waiting for their problems to be solved. What they don’t like is being kept in the dark. Complex questions increase the response time provoking employee frustration. Best-in-class ticketing systems integrate modern knowledge platform to simplify and expedit access to the corporate knowledge. 

Reduce ticket handling time

An employee asks a question. The question gets answered. So far, so good. Now what happens in a week’s time when another employee from another part of the business has the very same question? In an ideal world, they can jump immediately to the answer that’s already been provided. In an unideal world, they have to go through the same time-consuming ticketing process all over again. In other words, it pays to create a knowledge base of past tickets and make the answers available to your workforce whenever they need them.

Promote self-resolution

The average support ticket costs $15.56. So the fewer tickets there are, the more money your business makes. One way to reduce ticket volumes is to have a platform that democratizes knowledge and connects employees to the right answers quickly and easily, enabling them to resolve issues themselves.  

4 must-have features to upgrade internal ticketing 

What should you be looking for in an internal knowledge management platform integrated into your help desk tool? We’ve picked out five key features no decent solution should be without:

Mobile friendly

Around half of all internet traffic now comes from mobile phones. Making your system mobile-friendly will also mean that users can log in and resolve issues anytime, anywhere.

Intuitive interface

A modern knowledge management platform is there to save your team’s time. If employees have to spend hours learning how to use it effectively, the whole point of your system is lost. Aim for an interface that anybody can pick up and use. 

Easily accessible knowledge

Problems do not form an orderly queue. They arise suddenly and unpredictably, in a trickle and then all at once. It’s essential that your ticketing system can rely on a knowledge management platform where employees can find the answers they need faster.

Automatic translation

In our distributed work environment employees, most of the time don’t speak the same language. Enabling users to see all the content in the platform automatically translated on the fly into their preferred languages is critical to reducing the number of queries.

Reduce internal ticketing volumes with Starmind

A smartly configured, well-run internal ticketing system can be critical to your company’s success, enabling business problems to be solved quickly and efficiently. 

There is a caveat, however. If you don’t also provide employees with the means to resolve issues themselves, then even the best systems are prone to breakdown. Your internal help desk will become overloaded with the same trivial questions – and each time a new employee is hired, those questions will get asked all over again.

This is a serious business problem. Long ticket queues directly impact productivity and satisfaction levels, as employees have to wait unreasonable amounts of time to get work issues resolved.

Adopting a modern AI knowledge management platform like Starmind can help you significantly decrease internal ticketing volumes and improve your bottom line by enabling you to retain collective knowledge and give employees direct access to the expertise and answers they need. And even better, Starmind can integrate with existing ticketing system like ServiceNow so your employees can work the same way they always have with all the benefits of our platform. Learn how to reduce internal support tickets with a modern knowledge management platform powered by AI.