One of the biggest disruptions to IT staff productivity is having to rapidly shift from proactive work on strategic projects to cover reactive requests from end users.
While there are many techniques that IT teams will try to help mitigate these challenges, in the end, your production systems have to stay up and your users have to be able to access them when and where they need them. At the same time, businesses have come to rely on IT teams to deliver strategic solutions that help essential business functions, and delays on these projects can be very costly for the organization. Missed due dates are not an option.
Where the internal Help Desk falls short
The internal help desk function is the most common approach for IT teams. A resource is assigned to provide coverage for initial requests, and is ideally trained so they can handle the most common challenges without having to disrupt your more senior resources.
The challenge? Senior Living and Post-Acute Care environments are 24x7x365 operations and caregivers need IT support at all hours to provide optimal care for residents.
A strong help desk resource that works from 8 to 5 and has great people skills puts a wonderful face on your department, but what happens after hours? Are your staff and caregivers getting the same level of support?
- Excessive calls after hours can lead to attrition of IT resources placed on call if they are covered. In most cases, senior living organizations have their HR teams focused on recruiting caregivers, with limited availability to make quality IT hires. Maintaining your staff is of paramount importance to long term success.
- If calls are not being covered live after hours, multiple days can be added to resolution times as daytime resources look to clarify details on problems with evening and overnight staff. This clarification often takes multiple emails to resolve issues that could be covered in a relatively short phone call.
Aligning IT objectives with business objectives
Focus matters. For IT teams to be successful staying aligned with core business objectives and new productivity initiatives, distractions must be kept to a minimum. With growing technology adoption in the senior living industry, this has never been more true. Taking a step forward from an internal help desk to full Service Desk support is a key strategic route to minimize distractions for your IT staff and keep them focused on those strategic initiatives.
At vcpi, we provide strong expertise in the Senior Living and Post-Acute Care environments, ensuring your users are contacting IT support that actually understands the environment, phrases, and applications that your users are immersed in daily. Going beyond the simple level 1 support tasks, our service desk team can help reduce distractions to level 2 and level 3 resources, and at the same time, provide helpful and friendly application advice for your end users. Maintaining HIPAA compliance throughout is a topic that we live and breathe every day.
With easy options to extend your service desk beyond the daytime shift, your staff and caregivers will receive excellent support and fast resolution times. This goes a long way towards limiting job frustrations that can trigger turnover in areas of the business that are difficult to staff.
Want to learn more? We’d love to set up a quick discovery call to showcase how vcpi service desk can help your IT operations be more productive and efficient.
