User support is part of a large set of routines that can be implemented by the IT manager to make infrastructure management more effective. In this scenario, the sector’s activities play a prominent role, as they handle tickets, resolve questions, and reduce the impact of problems on the company’s daily operations.
IT support services can be divided between proactive support and reactive support. These models differ in their ability to handle tickets, scale operational capacity, and prevent problems.
Want to know the main differences between them? Then follow today’s article!
Main characteristics of reactive IT support
Reactive IT support acts whenever a problem occurs. There is no continuous search for failures, vulnerability tracking, and the creation of processes that automate sector activities on the part of IT technicians and analysts.
In this sense, monitoring routines, as well as the revaluation of operations, are not prioritized, preventing the support service from being continuously optimized.
Main characteristics of proactive IT support
Proactive IT support works on the continuous search for failures, security vulnerabilities, and other situations that can negatively impact the functioning of the business’s IT services.
Resource monitoring solutions, for example, are adopted so that technicians can quickly find any atypical situation in hardware and digital systems. Thus, it is possible to reduce the impact they cause on the sector’s operation and speed up the time required to resume services.
In addition, processes are continuously reevaluated. This allows operational bottlenecks to be eliminated and more effective operating standards to be adopted.
After all, which one is more advantageous?
As the presence of digital solutions expands, companies need to deal with the need to create services that help users solve problems and have a more fluid work routine. In this sense, IT support is fundamental for those who intend to add value to a business’s digital service portfolio. It will solve problems, handle tickets, and eliminate doubts that any professional might have when using one of the corporate tools.
Reactive IT support may not be able to meet the growing demand for services that have high availability and continuously add value to the company’s services. Quality indexes will fall continuously, since the sector’s capacity to solve problems and meet user demands will be reduced. In addition, the time required to resume services will be greater, since troubleshooting processes will be impaired by the absence of operating logs and monitoring tools.
The search for a proactive service is indispensable to enable the creation of an optimization flow. Activities will be continuously reevaluated, and the sector will be able to identify, through tools and operational processes, which points need improvement. Thus, it will be possible to adopt new, more effective ways of working and management, with a greater focus on the user.
Migrating from reactive IT support to a proactive service
Migrating the work routine of a reactive support team to a proactive culture can be done with a few simple steps. Well planned, this change will directly impact management costs, the time required to respond to failures, and the costs of digital service infrastructure management.
Among the main steps to be executed, we can highlight:
Definition of hardware alerts
Even if the company has an effective hardware management plan, equipment can often experience operating problems caused by request overload or external factors (such as power outages).
To prevent such situations from only being noticed when they are causing a major impact on the company’s functioning, managers can configure various alerts that will notify the team whenever a system or part exhibits atypical behavior.
Whenever the storage system is close to its maximum capacity, for example, the manager will be alerted and will be able to scale the used space. Likewise, memory error alerts, temperature increases, and service drops can be configured so that the company can identify problems with greater agility.
Implementation of monitoring solutions
Proactive support is capable of continuously monitoring resources. In this view, the automation of failure and vulnerability tracking routines increases the sector’s capacity and decreases the team’s workload.
Thus, whenever a system has to face an excess of requests or other problems that impact the user service capacity, the support service will be able to identify the origin of the situation and apply the necessary measures to eliminate the problem.
Service automation
A large part of support activities can be automated, eliminating the number of requests that reach technicians and allowing the redirection of activities to other processes. The creation of users and system resets, for example, can be directed to proprietary systems.
The use of documentation will also help decrease the sector’s workflow. By making the main troubleshooting processes public, the IT manager reduces the need for users to contact support whenever they have a problem with corporate IT systems.
Implementation of best practices
The use of best practice libraries, such as ITIL, allows the search for higher quality standards, in addition to aligning the company’s services with the market. The ITIL library has a set of activities and measures that can be implemented in an IT sector so that management and support routines become more directed to user needs.
And because it is versatile, ITIL can be adopted in various businesses. There is no need for the manager to use all the routines described in the documentation for the business to be optimized. And this makes its implementation simpler and more agile.
And for you, what is the best way to manage support services? Does your company want to migrate from reactive to proactive IT support? Share with us in the comments!
