The 7 Most Common Reasons for Help Desk Tickets

I’m frequently asked this question by potential customers: “How hard can help desk be?” And the question is based on a common assumption that mobile help desk is just activating devices, setting up email, and installing endpoint management software. 

The reality is quite a different story. Last year, our 24x7x365 help desk handled hundreds of thousands of tickets. These incidents were a combination of hundreds of reason types spread across hundreds of companies, healthcare providers, and educational organizations.  

How can there be so many reasons someone would need to submit help desk tickets and receive technical support assistance for their smartphone or tablet? There are three common themes across our customer 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 endpoint management 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 anyway?! 

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 a new device 
• International travel 

All of the above means you need a robust help desk solution that delivers the best possible user experiences to minimize downtime. It’s key to maintaining high productivity and ensuring your mobile technology solutions deliver on your goals.