The 7 Most Common Reasons for Help Desk Tickets

I’m frequently asked this question by potential clients – “How hard can help desk be?” And the question is based on a common assumption that mobile help desk is just activating iPhones, setting up email and installing EMM/MDM on a device. 

The reality is quite a different story. Last year our 24x7x365 contact center handled 247,681 help desk tickets. These incidents were a combination of 151 reason types, spread across 153 companies.  

As I try to wrap my head around how there can be so many reasons someone would need to submit help desk tickets and receive technical support assistance for their smartphone or tablet, I realized there are three common themes across our client base. 

1. Clients with corporate-liable devices have an average of 20 times the incidents than those organizations who have made the decision to go BYOD. 
2. Do you have an EMM/MDM solution? If so, you are looking at 5 to 7 times more incidents than a company rolling the dice without one. 
3. Do you have native and/or 3rd party applications your employees leverage to do their jobs? If so, your end-users will need technical support help up to 50% greater than those without supported applications. 

The next step was trying to group the reason types into similar buckets. I needed to do this, as I wanted to make sure our Training Team was building content we could use across our entire client base. Who wants to build 153 separate sets of Knowledge Base articles and unique trainings anyways?! 

While I did see many common reason types, such as the ones our prospects assumed were all they needed to worry about, they only made up less than 40% of our overall incidents. It was also interesting to see how frequently end users needed our expertise to answer basic questions around the day-to-day use of the device (19% of requests), rightsizing their smartphone or carrier plan (8% of requests) or connecting to their device outside of the office (7% of requests). 

So now we’ve identified almost three-quarters of the reasons an end-user needs our support.  

What other common reason types made the list? 

• Device cancellation 
• Forgotten passcode 
• Upgrading to the newest iPhone or Android 
• International travel 

Next month I will dig into what steps we are taking to answer these questions upfront via self-service, which will keep end-users working more and on the phone with us less!