You’ve lost your internet connection, and panic starts to set in. Your small business’s operations have stopped, and you can’t help but wonder how much money you’ll lose.

Research shows that IT downtime can cost an organization an average of $5,600 each minute, or $336,000 per hour. Technology-related downtime can easily happen due to problems like software failures, malicious attacks, and network outages.

An IT service management, or ITSM, provider can help you maintain a productive workplace by managing your IT systems. Let’s explore the IT service management principles and practices that can help companies provide stellar service.

1. Create a Tech Support Strategy

A critical ITSM best practice is to evaluate your existing ITSM setup. You can then develop a clear strategy to help you achieve your business’s goals. Asking yourself the following questions can help you create an effective strategy:

  • Do you have enough agents to solve user issues promptly?
  • How does your organization generate trouble tickets?
  • Do users know how to submit and access tickets?

Check in with your business leaders, IT help desk, and users to determine the answers to the questions. You can then develop a plan to address their support or network security issues and adjust the plan over time to improve customer service (more on this next).

2. Develop Metrics

A second best practice related to workplace technologies is to establish key performance indicators, or KPIs, for your company’s ITSM strategy. This will help you understand your existing strategy’s success and pinpoint opportunities for improvement.

One KPI to consider is the average time for the first response. This refers to how long a tech support agent takes to initially respond to a user who reports a tech incident. The lower the response time, the better.

Another KPI is the resolution time, which is how long your help desk takes to resolve user issues and requests. Lower resolution times lead to more satisfied end-users.

3. Embrace Automation

Yet another best practice for IT service management is to use automation to streamline critical tasks at your organization. Business automation offers several benefits, including freeing up your agents for complicated tasks. Use it to give users self-service capabilities, too.

Examples of tasks to automate include sending automated email follow-ups and replies. Consider also using automation to test web applications or perform data visualization.

Remember that automation isn’t designed to replace humans but to augment the human experience. A provider of ITSM services can help you determine which aspects of your business may benefit from automation.

IT Service Management Principles and Practices

The top IT service management principles and practices include creating a strategy for managing your IT systems. Other ITSM best practices range from developing metrics to measure your success to embracing automation.

At Inception Network Strategies, we offer high-level managed information technology services to help your company run smoothly. Our other services include IT support that you pay for as you need and hosted and cloud backups. Contact us to learn more about our ITSM services, and partner with us today!