Often located in the basements of residence halls, campus IT teams at several colleges nationwide are constantly followed by a long line of students waiting to get their computer fixed, connection issues resolved, or passwords reset. Visit almost any company to find the frantic IT team sitting in a corner, surrounded by computer monitors, accessories, and employees lingering to ask questions. At the local library, IT staff tirelessly drive back and forth between branches responding to various complaints from visitors and librarians. What do all of these people have in common (besides wanting to pull their hair out)?

Their hatred of the never-ending pile of help desk tickets.

While help desk tickets have helped IT teams across industries keep track of and assist with user problems, they can also be a hindrance to productivity and take time away from other pressing projects. This isn’t a good experience for the end users either, who often waste hours, or even days to get their issue resolved, reducing their productivity in return. While the need for help desk tickets is not going away, there are ways that IT teams can reduce the number of tickets they receive so they can focus on more proactive activities. Here are three easy ways to start reducing the number of help desk tickets:

1. Use an onboarding solution for devices

Whether it’s college students moving into their freshman year dorm rooms with 10+ devices sprawled on the floor waiting to be connected, or an employee trying to access the network from their phone to check an urgent email, getting all devices logged onto the network can be a bigger challenge than expected. This is also the cause of the majority of help desk tickets, especially for those who work at a college or university. By implementing an onboarding solution, users can seamlessly authenticate all of their devices onto the network painlessly, without having to worry about forgetting their password or struggling to connect IoT devices.

2. Implement reliable wireless connections

One of the most frequent complaints to come across an IT administrator’s desk? Slow or poor Wi-Fi connectivity. With the vast majority of users across a campus, city, or office building now accessing the network wirelessly, ensuring that these users can connect to and access the Internet seamlessly will greatly reduce the number of help desk tickets—and the number of nasty complaints on social media. By deploying cloud-managed access points and switches, IT teams can manage and troubleshoot network issues from anywhere, leading to a faster time to resolution and fewer users experiencing network problems. With automated alerts, IT teams can even solve network issues before they receive a complaint, so users are never even aware there was an outage.

3. Be proactive with analytics

Are several users submitting tickets about the same issue? Is there one building where users are submitting more tickets than another? Is there enough bandwidth to support a large event? Most IT teams don’t readily have the answers to these questions, mainly because they are focused on solving the tickets that cross their desk, rather than analyzing the underlying issue or where the request originated from. But with visibility into the network and the performance of individual applications, it becomes much easier to solve several issues at once, maybe even issues IT didn’t know existed, which later results in fewer help desk tickets. By figuring out some of the underlying issues, IT teams can re-allocate access points to cover dead zones, check potentially faulty cabling in older buildings, and test their user connection speeds—solving problems before they even result in a ticket.

 

Feeling empowered to start minimizing your ticket queue? The IT team at Eastern University understands this feeling all too well. Students were continuously complaining about poor network connectivity in the residence halls, leading to a pile of help desk tickets, which skyrocketed during move-in week. To help solve this problem, they deployed Cisco Meraki wireless and switching across their dorms and have dramatically reduced the number of helpdesk tickets they receive each year. But don’t just take it from us–join us on December 6th at 9am PT for a live webinar with Eric McCloy, Chief Information Officer of Eastern University, to learn how Meraki wireless has improved student connections. We look forward to seeing you there!