All posts by SystemsNet Administrator

5 Reasons Your Employees Need an Internal IT Help Desk

Manage Service, , ,
Internal IT help desk: IT engineer in the server room connecting cables

Whether your a small business or large enterprise, SystemsNet has the right plan for you

As your business grows, it’s important to start thinking not just about the needs of the customers, but also about the needs of your internal staff. A small business starts as a team, grows into a structure, and then finally becomes a microcosm community of professionals all working together toward a common goal. An office that grows large enough needs an office manager, then admin staff, then an entire HR department. And the IT needs of your office follow a very similar path. First, you need a tech to call when the computers break, then a team who can set up a network of workstations sporting the business software. And, eventually, your staff will need an IT help desk to keep your tech infrastructure up and running as the company continues to grow.

Today, we’re here to explore not just the use of an IT help desk, but why your employees need the help of on-call technicians to maintain efficiency, security, and workflow.

1) On-Demand Repairs for Software & Computers

When a workstation breaks or your company software malfunctions, work stops. No company likes to see a paid employee twiddling their thumbs at a broken workstation or losing hours trying to solve tech errors that won’t go away. Having an IT help desk on-call is the best thing you can do for employees who want to keep working but are stopped by malfunctioning technology.

An IT help desk knows all the right answers. Not only can they help employees fiddle with settings to get the best performance, but they also know when a reboot or even reinstalling the software would be faster and cleaner than trying to unsnarl a messy problem. Your IT team can even get held-up employees on a different workstation while the broken station goes in for repairs.

2) Make Full Use of New Company Software

Of course, IT isn’t just there to fix problems. An IT help desk used correctly can also guide employees to making the most use of their company software. Business software tends to be complex with a great many options available to streamline work and connect data. However, employees tend to learn only a few basic uses of the software at first then become more skilled with it over time.

With help from the IT help desk, employees can call for guidance on how to do certain tasks and IT can show them how to make much more diverse and efficient use of the software in the process. From there, your employees can teach each other and share tricks to increase the productivity and skills of the entire team.

3) Guidance Setting Up New Workstations

When a team grows (or a workstation breaks) new workstations are necessary to allow for that growth. Each new workstation will need to be installed with the write operating system and cybersecurity infrastructure. It will need to be connected to the company network, have the business software installed, and accept logins from company employees.

Setting all this up can be done by team members or on-site IT but it’s much easier to handle with a knowledgeable tech on the phone. An IT help desk tech can walk any employee through the process of booting up and setting up a new workstation. Especially if you already have a workstation ‘image’ that can be used for backup recovery or to create an identical workstation to those already in use.

4) Reporting Suspected Phishing or Malware Attacks

When employees receive a phishing email or suspect they have just witnessed a malware attack, they need someone to call. Cybersecurity is vital and employee vigilance plays a major part in keeping company data safe. Your IT help desk can serve as an employee’s next line of defense, the IT authority to call to help the company maintain cybersecurity integrity.

An IT helpdesk tech can tell employees what to do (and what not to do) in response to a malware attack or a phishing email and may be able to use that information to neutralize the threat.

5) Enacting Disaster Recovery Steps

Finally, who do your employees call when a computer crashes, eats a database, or seems to be infected with malware? When you need backup recovery enacted, you don’t necessarily need an IT professional on-site. A call to the IT help desk can assist the team in walking through the correct backup recover steps to restore lost files or wipe and fully restore an infected workstation

Having an IT help desk for your team serves many purposes and can solve a wide variety of problems that occur in most modern businesses. From making use of software to stopping a malware attack in its tracks, your IT help desk can ensure your team is using their workstations and software to the utmost benefit for the company. For more on how IT help desk services for your business, contact us today!

6 Ways to Reduce Background Noise in Office VOIP Calls

VOIP, , ,
Smiling handsome customer support operator agent making VOIP calls on a nice headset with a good quality microphone with hands-free device working in call center

The quality and clarity of VoIP calls, along with the features available makes the service a viable solution compared to traditional phone lines.

The incredible sound quality provided by modern VOIP calls has been commented on many times. The internet is now capable of conveying sound at as high or higher quality than landline telephones with no loss in detail along the way. However, just as HD tv allows you to see the pores of actors, high-quality phone calls suddenly reveal just how noisy your office really is.

Surely, you’ve heard the hum of fans and the murmur of coworkers on a call when another caller opens their mic to speak. No doubt, that same kind of office background noise can be heard on many professional calls. The good news is that there are several ways to reduce the background noise in VOIP calls without making the office a ‘quiet zone’. Here’s how:

1) Hand Out Quality Headsets

First, get every employee who makes VOIP calls on a nice headset with a good quality microphone. The headsets will ensure two things. First, that employees aren’t using their speakers to hear calls, adding to the noise and potential for call-echo. Second, a good quality microphone will be better at picking up only the speaker’s voice without picking up every rustle of paper or keyboard clack in a shared office space.

2) Reduce Fan Noise

Fan noise is a serious problem in office, big or small. The sound of your HVAC or the box fans you use to keep cool in spite of the HVAC can have a hugely negative effect on your call audio quality. That hum and rattle can be heard on an open mic and can make an entire conference call less pleasant. Do everything you can to reduce the noise fans make in rooms where calls occur.

This might involve repairing or updating your HVAC fans, replacing or cleaning your floor fans, or replacing noisy fans with modern quieter versions of same. Loud printers fall under the same rule.

3) Make Use of Noise Reduction Panels

Noise reduction panels are attractive pieces of wall art or subtly integrated pieces of furniture designed for offices to soak up that ambient sound. noise reduction uses a combination of foam and fabric to ‘catch’ noises as they pass and muffle them so that they cannot be heard at a distance. They can be used to create privacy, quiet spots, and simply to reduce the amount of noise that travels from one section of the office to the other. The more you decorate or build with noise reduction panels, the quieter your office can potentially become.

4) Hold Calls in Quiet Offices

If calls are an occasional but not constant feature in your office, then providing quiet offices may be enough. Allow employees to book or borrow the spare quiet rooms available in your office so that they can hold their occasional calls and conferences in audio privacy. This way, the murmur of coworkers or the hum of big-room HVAC vents will not reduce the quality of their calls.

5) Provide ‘Cone of Silence’ Desk Hutches

If you have an open workspace full of employees who are constantly making calls (or don’t have spare quiet offices) then an interesting alternative is to build sound-privacy hutches out of noise reduction panels. These hutches can even fold away and then be brought out when it’s time to make a call. Essentially, these hutches act as portable ‘cones of silence’ so that when an employee pops their head into the hutch, suddenly office noise is reduced and they are audibly alone with the call.

6) Fluffy Plantlife

Finally, never discount the value of fluffy plants. Cubicle hedgerows, walls of flowering vines, and other office greenery are great ways to absorb sound. Plants not only make people happy and improve the air quality, the fluffy leaves also catch sound and prevent it from wandering too far across the room. In combination with noise reduction panels, you might be surprised how quiet an open workspace can become.

Improving the audio quality of VOIP calls is about much more than bandwidth. By mastering the ambient noise in your office, you can ensure that every employee can make crystal-clear calls with their new VOIP numbers without offending or deafening their contacts with background sounds. For more VOIP insights on how to optimize unified communications for your business, contact us today!

A Practical Approach to Disaster Recovery

Data Backup, ,
DRP Disaster Recovery Plan written in a notebook

Disaster Recovery is a serious matter and will save your business when an event occurs.

Many computer users tend to resolve issues and glitches as they come. That works fine for some people and circumstances but for the more productivity-oriented environments such as businesses, there needs to be a plan to resolve issues as soon as they come. Otherwise, monetary loss looms. Businesses that heavily rely on computers should outsource the repair and maintenance of them to professionals — especially data preservation and restoration in the events of breakdowns. Disaster recovery typically involves restoring backed up data, but it also encompasses quick restoration of devices with the correct configuration so that business continuity is good with as little interruption as possible. Generally, the more time a computer or computer network is out of order, the more money that will be lost — as the old adage goes, “Time is money!” Some business managers and owners have a tendency to attempt to save money by outsourcing as little as possible to professionals. This can be an extremely stressful situation — businesses alone have caveats that can cause excessive stress, but to attempt to manage the repair, maintenance, and data backup on top of that can completely usurp the joy out of owning or operating a business, as well as risk unintentional damage to computer systems — unintentional damage can be caused by attempting repairs without sufficient knowledge — and that of consequences of the outcome. Disaster recovery in highly productive environments should be left to professionals and below there are a few points to keep in mind when starting or running a business that relies heavily on one or more computers.

Starting Up

Whether the business has been booming for a while or things are just getting started, keeping the office computer-repertoire as simple as possible is a cornerstone. Seeking purchasing decisions from well-informed IT professionals is recommended and will generally turn out based on the needs of the business. Purchasing appropriate hardware will make it easier to mitigate times of disaster such as when computers are stolen, fires break out, vandalism occurs, or computers breakdown. If a business has been going for a while, downgrading certain types of products could help disaster mitigation as well as save money, but these types of decisions should also be backed by educated personnel.

Smart Hiring Decisions

A search for quality professionals can be started on the internet. Criteria to measure the quality of a service provider might include the number of years in business, whether professionals are certified, reviews, and affordability. Quality criteria are not limited to what’s listed here, but they’re a good place to start. Disaster recovery is a critical type of service that should not be downplayed whereby cheap and easy service is retained by the business in need of it. Professional services that are cheap and relatively easy to retain might be better suited for quick-fixes, but not for disaster recovery — it’s a branch of IT that needs to be properly planned and not applied only when something bad happens — without a sound recovery plan, a business will eventually be “dead in the water.”

Testing It Out

Once a disaster recovery plan has been implemented, it should be monitored closely to see what should go and what should stay. Working closely with a disaster recovery service is key while carrying out day-to-day operations — anything unusual or not functioning as intended should be reported as soon as possible unless it’s monitored remotely by the disaster recovery service. With knowledgeable IT professionals working behind the scene, the prognosis of disaster is good.

SystemsNet is a multifaceted IT service provider with years of experience and expertise on staff qualified to carry out disaster recovery. Please contact us.

5 Tips to Increase Your IT Help Desk Inquiry Efficiency

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IT Help Desk Inquiry Efficiency Concept

How efficient is your internal help desk?

The usefulness of your IT help desk isn’t just in the software you use or the skilled technicians solving problems. It’s also in how your employees approach their problems that need solutions. If you really want to increase both the efficiency and effectiveness of your IT help desk, part of that formula is helping your staff ask questions efficiently and learn to solve more common or basic problems on their own.

Here are five highly effective ways to increase the inquiry efficiency of your IT help desk.

1) Include Live Chat and Ticketed Inquiries

Traditional help desks function with ticketed inquiries. Employees send an email or use a form to submit an asynchronous request for assistance with any information they have. This works well for off-hours or long-solve solutions, but it can actually slow down the solve on quick or surface-level problems. Live chat has been found to be more effective at high-speed and interactive IT support than email or phone because it allows both parties to ask and answer questions quickly, share files, and run troubleshooting tests in real time.

2) Build a Detailed Tech FAQ – Keep it Updated

Interestingly, you can also increase help desk efficiency by eliminating a percentage of inquiries made. The answer is simple: A really helpful and well-build FAQ. FAQs have evolved well beyond a list of question-and-answers into ‘help portals’ that assist the user in finding the answers to common and easy to solve problems.

For example, you probably don’t need as many IT help desk calls about troubleshooting printers or employee emails as your help desk handles. A good FAQ as your first line of defense can help employees quickly solve any problem that is already known and has only a few simple steps to try.

3) Equip Chatbots to Answer FAQ Questions

Of course, not everyone is apt at searching a FAQ or help portal for the answers they need. Others don’t have time to explore the interface. For your rushed employees, the key to streamlining quick IT services and access to the FAQ is a simple chatbots. Programmable chatbots can be ‘loaded up’ with answers to common questions. And a common question is a FAQ by any other name.

What this means is that not only can you provide a FAQ answer portal, you can also equip a chatbot assistant to listen for ‘FAQ’-like questions and give the standard answer. This will speed up early troubleshooting immensely. A Chatbot can also direct employees to a real live IT help desk member for questions that go beyond the scope of the FAQ.

4) Provide Micro-Learning on Common IT Solutions

You can even teach your employees to handle increasingly complex-yet-common fixes through the use of micro-learning modules. These ‘just-in-time’ lessons can walk employees through how to do complex fixes that your company may deal with on a regular basis. The best part about micro-learning lessons is that you can ask your IT help desk team to create or map them based on the questions they really do get and solve the most often. From there, employees can summon the lesson and walk themselves through common solves without having to call IT again.

5) Have Employees Mark Category and Urgency

Finally, for problems that can’t be handled through FAQ best-practices or a quick live chat, you want a superb ticket sorting procedure. Your IT help desk can do their job best when they know what each ticket is about, how much time it will take, and how urgent the solution is before they start. Which means your team needs to know how to convey this information when they submit a problem.

When possible, ask employees to mark the category, severity, and urgency of every support ticket they request from your IT help desk. The more detail you encourage to be shared, the better. This gives your IT team a clear place to start when they pick up the ticket, live or asynchronously.

Providing an IT help desk to your employees is an important step in streamlining any modern business. But the help desk doesn’t have to be on your permanent staff. Take advantage of internal streamlining techniques and the logistic advantage of outsourced IT professionals. For more information about how to make your IT help desk more efficient, contact us today.