An IT Support Blog from London

It's widely acknowledged that today's business environment is predominantly driven by technology. Remote work setups and digital solutions have become major components of every organisation. This makes the IT service desk an essential element that helps ensure seamless operations and user satisfaction.

The modern IT service desk should be designed to promote a culture of continuous improvement. This encourages the IT team to evolve and meet the needs of the digital workplace, empowering enterprises to boost support capabilities and elevate the customer experience. If you’re looking to do this in your organisation, it’s important to make your IT service desk suitable and effective for your business.

This blog post explores seven impactful strategies for optimising the IT service desk. The aim is to provide useful insights that will lead to actionable guidance for IT leaders and service desk managers.

IT support is a fundamental service every organisation should provide regardless of size or industry. Reliable tech support creates a lasting positive impact for both external and internal customers. For end-users, a successfully-resolved tech issue with the company’s software product leaves them with a pleasant customer experience — one that they are likely to share with others. At the same time, IT support services that can promptly troubleshoot employees’ technical issues promotes productivity and general operational efficiency.

Larger enterprises may opt to have two separate support teams responsible for troubleshooting internal network problems and for dealing with customer concerns respectively. Smaller businesses, on the other hand, often maintain just one IT team to handle both external and internal tech support. Regardless of the logistics, one thing has become clear as people and organisations rely more on technology: IT solutions and automation tools are a great help in streamlining processes and improving service quality.

In this post, we highlight 6 help desk automation tools that can boost your business’ IT support desk.

Given the advanced IT solutions that are available to enterprises today, there’s no question that the business landscape is evolving—and fast. Technology is the driving force behind these rapid changes and if companies are not prudent enough, the influx of different tech tools can drive up IT spending without the anticipated benefits. One way of making your tech solutions work for you in ways that can create a real impact on your bottom line is to engage the services of a managed services provider or MSP.

As one of the most groundbreaking technologies of our time, cloud computing has revolutionised the way people do business. The cloud’s many characteristics have allowed organisations to change the way they approach and provision IT infrastructure. But these benefits—flexibility, scalability, agility, and cost-effectiveness, among others, can only be realised if companies are able to recognise what the cloud offers and leverage these features.

In order to maximise the cloud’s features, businesses now turn to managed IT services for guidance. So just as enterprises have evolved because of cloud services, so have managed services providers (MSPs). In this blog post, we look into the ways that organisations have come to rely on cloud services, understand how the cloud is evolving, and explore the role of IT managed services in maximising opportunities provided by the cloud.

If you're a small or medium-sized business looking to scale your operations and improve organisational efficiency, IT managed services can help jump-start the process. They provide an end-to-end system of delivering, managing, and optimising technology solutions tailored to meet your specific needs. This range of invaluable IT services has propelled the growth of MSPs, as organisations come to rely on them more.

In this blog post, we'll go through seven best practices to enhance efficiency in your operations—from embracing a proactive stance to fostering an environment of continuous improvement. We will also discuss how you can get the most out of incorporating IT managed services into your enterprise’s overall strategies.

There’s been a lot of technological advancement going on in the past decade or so, and it’s all organisations could do to keep pace. But it’s essential that they do. After all, leveraging new technologies and tools while ensuring that their IT infrastructure is equipped for such demand is key to having enterprises operate efficiently, maximising profits, and remaining competitive in their field.

Managing all these however, can easily get overwhelming for small and mid-sized businesses who don’t have a full-time IT staff on board. This is where IT managed services providers have proven to be invaluable. Managed services providers (MSPs) take on the crucial tasks of monitoring and maintaining IT systems—networks, servers, workstations, etc.; installing and updating software; hardware maintenance, security and compliance management, managed IT support, and more. And just as technology is evolving, so are the services of MSPs.

In this post, we'll explore some of the latest trends in IT managed services, including how emerging technologies like AI and automation are being utilised, the growing importance of cybersecurity, and the rise of cloud-based services.

Exceptional customer service is par for the course today as businesses are getting more competitive. Besides, given the general reliance on technology, and with some people being less tech-savvy than others, support services have become even more of a necessity.

That customers demand more and better in terms of customer service is also a factor that enterprises should seriously consider. According to software company Freshworks’ collection of customer service statistics for 2023, “64% of customers want a reply within an hour of posting on Twitter, and 85% of customers said they expect a company to respond within six hours.” Quite a tall order, that.

But as to what type of support service should be offered is something that businesses have to identify first: is it technical support or customer support? Confusion between the two is rather common and because of this, the terms are often used interchangeably. This blog post will look into the key differences between tech support and customer support, and why it’s essential to know the distinction.

First off, let’s review their definitions.

Technology is the core element that drives the business operations of most organisations—from the hardware store down the street that uses cloud solutions for inventory and accounting, to the multinational enterprise that stores data and workloads in a hosted private cloud. With such heavy reliance on IT, you need to make sure that your IT organisation is an optimised, well-oiled machine that brings the most business value.

In this post, we dive into a basic understanding of IT service management (ITSM), why it’s important, and how it can help you best manage your IT initiatives to enable effective service delivery. So, first things first:

Artificial intelligence has been growing in leaps and bounds in the last decade, making processes easier and bringing about significant changes in almost every industry. It’s not surprising that the AI global market is expected to hit US$ 1.8 trillion by 2030, from just US$ 136 billion in 2022. Now while most of us have had some experience with AI-assisted online shopping and have definitely heard of autonomous vehicles—some of the most well-known applications of AI, there’s a lot more out there.

A recently-introduced AI-powered technology has created such a huge impact across many fields, with social media feeds inundated by reviews and potential use cases of this tool. We’re talking about OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In this post, we discuss what it is and how it works, why it’s gaining a lot of attention, and how it can be relevant to your business.

No organisation today can function without technology. Gone is the traditional office environment and with it, the tons of paperwork, adding machines, airmail envelopes, and the trusty old landline. Even in-person meetings and physical reporting for work have become optional. What has become indispensable in the modern workplace instead, is the assortment of IT devices—servers, desktops, laptops, connectivity devices, smartphones, etc., as well as IT services and applications for every business process.

An enterprise’s IT hardware and software components however are only as good as their capacity to function effectively, and the users’ collective ability to utilise them. Consider the potential loss of opportunity for instance, if an ecommerce website experienced downtime for even a few hours. Or think about the employees’ wasted time if they are unable to use their PCs or access their work applications due to some technical issue. This is where the value of IT support is most apparent.