After hours help desk for IT teams
After hours help desk for IT teams
Whether you’re a managed service company bound by service level agreements or an internal IT department supporting user groups across your company, it’s important that you maintain an open line of communication. IT support issues can arise at any time and customer satisfaction depends on your ability to field and respond to those requests quickly.
Help desk answering services from Absent Answer deliver the 24 hour availability your help desk needs while minimizing operational costs. Instead of increasing your overhead, our IT answering services limit expenses to the actual time spent fielding support requests. You only pay for the time spent handling real calls, not the idle downtime you’d be responsible for if you were to hire a new employee.
Improve help desk service levels
Improve help desk service levels
Tier 1 help desk answering services help free up your staff to focus on the most pressing problems, not manning the phones and dealing with every inquiry that’s thrown your way. Our 24 hour help desk service is available 365 days a year to answer calls in the name of your company or department and process inquiries as an extension of your operation.
By establishing a 24 hour telephone hotline for your help desk, you ensure that clients and users always have a point of contact, even when your regular onsite engineers or Tier 2 support representatives are out of the office or tied up on other projects.
Answering Service Features
How It Works
Having Absent Answer handle your tier 1 help desk calls is easier than you think. It’s as simple as establishing your account instructions, training our team, and then forwarding your phone lines whenever you want our agents to answer calls on your behalf. You can turn your calls over to Absent Answer at the same time every evening when your department closes for the day, during holidays when the office is closed, during busy periods, or on demand. We’re there to answer whenever your team needs us.
Here’s how a help desk answering service works:
1.
A User Calls
A caller dials your support phone number. This could be a user with a routine password reset request, a field service technician updating dispatch on the status of a ticket, routine office calls, or an after hours support emergency that requires immediate attention.
2.
We Answer
Instead of ringing your office line and going to voicemail, burdening your on-call engineers with non-urgent requests, or sitting on hold while your team is busy handling other tasks, all calls made to your support desk are routed directly to our friendly call center agents, who immediately recognize that the call is for your company and greets the caller accordingly.
3.
We Take Action
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for handling tier 1 help desk calls, so our team is armed with your precise instructions and handles each call per your policies and procedures. We can perform initial call screening and route the call to the appropriate technician if certain criteria are met, take a message for the office, or complete routine support tasks directly over the phone, such as providing current ticket status or logging new details in your web-based help desk software.
Benefits of Technical Support Outsourcing
- Extend help desk availability. Downtime notifications, urgent systems issues, and routine access problems can occur at any time. Limiting your help desk availability to office hours means you’re unable to field customer calls a significant portion of the time, increasing the likelihood of urgent issues going unresolved and straining customer relationships. Our 24 hour help desk allows you to maintain constant availability and always have a live operator ready to open tickets and resolve routine requests.
- Deliver excellent customer service. Calls to your support desk are important, and every detail impacts the customer experience. From the tone of the operator’s voice to their level of understanding and ability to efficiently process the request, every step presents an opportunity to either improve the customer experience or introduce friction and costly miscommunication. We recognize the importance of these calls and train our agents on your policies so that routine issues can be resolved in real-time while others are escalated or held depending on urgency.
- Improve support response times. Our help desk answering service agents follow your call escalation procedures and can rapidly relay support requests to on-call personnel. In addition to fielding calls immediately as they come in and minimizing hold time, our agents can swiftly collect pertinent information and weed out non-urgent inquiries so that only critical tickets reach you after hours.
- Provide live operator support. Technology is great, but sometimes it can get in the way of communication and human support needs. Sometimes, users need to hear a live voice to feel assured that their concern is being addressed and that help is on the way. If a customer is contacting support, generally there’s something wrong, and the last thing you want to do is make a bad situation worse by relying on impersonal automated systems or telephone trees that exacerbate the issue. Our tier 1 help desk services ensure there are always agents available to answer live.
Tier 1 Technical Support Options
Our help desk answering service is completely customizable. We take calls as an extension of your IT company. We can log new tickets and escalate support requests to the appropriate personnel, take routine messages and hold them for office hours, or walk callers through step by step processes that you outline in advance. Any configuration you can imagine, we can implement within our system.
Routine help desk answering services include:
- After Hours Help Desk Support. Do you want calls to your support line answered by live agents 24 hours a day? Do you wish your level 1 support reps were available around-the-clock? We’ve got you covered. Our 24 hour help desk answering service can deliver the call coverage you need, when you need it.
- Tier 1 Support Desk. Give your customers a single phone number they can use to request support or notify you of urgent issues impacting their IT operations. Our tier 1 support hotline can take routine messages or escalate issues directly to on-call support staff, allowing us to serve as the frontlines and filter out non-urgent items while ensuring important issues get the attention they need. We can reduce costly distractions while also decreasing your risk and liability.
- Support Overflow Answering Service. Don’t leave callers hanging when your support desk experiences a spike in phone calls. Our Overflow answering services for IT companies is a cost effective way to ensure you always have backup telephone coverage and never miss a support inquiry. When your phone lines are busy, excess calls overflow to our call center, where our agents answer in the name of your company and handle calls as an extension of your team.
- On-call Engineer and Technician Paging. Our IT on-call dispatching service is designed for technology companies or support departments who provide 24 hour on-site support and need an effective way to screen calls and dispatch on-call technicians. We can deliver call details to the appropriate technician based on the type of call, location, time, and other factors that may alter the escalation procedure.
We serve a variety of information technology operations including:
- IT Departments and Facility Maintenance Teams
- Managed Service Providers (MSPs)
- Software Support Departments
- Corporate Help Desks
- On-call Support Staff
- Hosting and Networking Companies
- IT Consultants
- And more!
Call Center Solutions Built for Your IT Needs
Allow the friendly receptionists at Absent Answer to take your calls while you focus on managing your IT operations. We are based in the U.S. and operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, delivering unparalleled support to IT managers and technical support departments across the country.
Common applications of our help desk answering services include:
- 24 hour help desk solutions. We enable you to address trouble tickets around the clock without sending every call to your on-call engineers or tier 2 support team. Our personalized help desk service can be structured to ensure the right calls reach on-call personnel while non-urgent issues wait for the office to return or get addressed in real-time (one call resolution).
- IT support dispatching. Even though your office is closed, clients may still encounter an urgent issue that requires immediate attention. Our on-call scheduling software enables IT departments to define the exact contact procedures for their on-call personnel, which is then used by our agents whenever a call needs to be paged or relayed to the individual or vendor on-call. Urgent messages can be immediately text messaged, paged, emailed, or warm transferred to your on-call technicians so that urgent technology issues are immediately addressed.
- IT department virtual receptionist. Why limit your availability when you can take calls 24 hours a day? Our friendly virtual receptionists are always there to take calls and work as an extension of your IT operation. Our personalized scripting can be setup to ensure we collect exactly the information you need from every caller, initiating the trouble ticket process and giving your callers peace of mind by delivering routine issues to the office for follow-up.
Help Desk Answering Service Features
- Quality customer service. Absent Answer’s help desk answering service provides highly trained agents who deliver quality customer service on behalf.
- Live help desk support. Every call is answered live by a warm, friendly voice committed to helping your customers navigate the support process.
- Call recording and reporting. All calls are recorded and time stamped, with detailed call reports made available so that you can track usage and maintain proof of service level compliance.
- On-call scheduling software. If your your company has rotating on-call coverage or specialized instructions based on the nature of the call, our On-Call Scheduling software will ensure the correct person is contacted every time. When changes are made, they instantly update our system so that we reach the correct person.
- Web-based system integration. Our call center agents can utilize your web-based ticket system or support software to perform routine office tasks, such as opening trouble tickets or looking up customer information.
- Fail-safe systems and disaster recovery. Our service quality is just one reason that successful technology companies turn to Absent Answer to help them grow. Our call center has taken great care to make sure we have redundancy in our operations. We realize that being available on a 24/7 basis for you requires us to maintain excellent up-time.
- Customized call scripting and routing. Our sophisticated software allows us to become an extension of your IT team. We are able to handle new customer inquiries, provide information and process tier 1 help desk requests. If your company has a mobile field-service team or multiple clients, we are able to quickly and efficiently connect callers to the most qualified representative. We can even rotate support requests automatically using our customer referral software.
About Absent Answer
At Absent Answer, we’ve been answering support calls since 1985.
Each and every call, message, IT emergency and routine trouble ticket gets handled accurately – 100% of the time. That kind of reliability allows you to focus on supporting critical operations while we worry about handling your calls and serving as your virtual help desk agents. The personal touch that your clients feel is the same personal attention you can expect every day.
To your customers, we are a friendly, helpful extension of your team.
To your support team and on-call personnel, Absent Answer is an accurate and reliable virtual assistant who knows you and your company. We are your virtual assistants who never miss a call, take a day off, or call in sick.
The Absent Answer Difference
Why choose Absent Answer as the answering service for your IT company?
Positive, Outgoing Support Staff
When we say we have the best personnel in the industry, we mean it. Our call center specialists have been with us an average of 8 years. The industry average is a mere 18 months. Some of our staff has been with us since the beginning.
We only hire positive, outgoing people to assist your customers, so you can have peace of mind knowing your calls will be handled in the most courteous and professional manner. Our extensive training program ensures that all of our employees are prepared to answer the myriad of call types that may come their way.
Highly Trained Help Desk Agents
Absent Answer works closely with you to develop service benchmarks and create a consistent training program to ensure that all agents are fully trained to provide your clients, executives, office staff, on-call engineers, and outside contractors with attentive service and exceptional attention to detail.
Superior Quality Standards & Reliability
Our clients consistently rate the quality of our service as good/excellent 97% of the time.
To ensure up-time and availability, our telephone circuits are set up with a fail-over in case of fiber optic cuts. We maintain redundant servers for all critical systems and ensure all data is backed up with UPS and natural gas generators in case of a power outage. Your IT department can remain available no matter what, even in the face of a natural disaster that takes down other operations.
US-based Help Desk
All our help desk agents work and live in the USA. There is no offshore outsourcing.
FAQs
Do you answer calls in the name of our company?
Yes, we can answer calls in the name of your business. A common greeting is to thank the caller for their call, announce the company or department, then collect information about the nature of the call.
How do you determine whether a call should be escalated to tier 2 support?
Tier 2 issues are determined based on the nature of the call and whether it aligns with your after hours help desk policies. You can allow callers or on-call personnel to determine whether calls are urgent or not, or have our call center agents cross reference support requests with a list of priority customers or emergency situations that you provide us in advance. Our call center can be setup to follow the exact policies spelled out in your service level agreements or department mandates.
Can customers reach our on-call technicians after hours?
Only if you want them to. By using Absent Answer to provide tier 1 help desk support on your behalf, every call we receive after hours will reach us first, and our team will be responsible for filtering out non-urgent issues and ensuring only select calls reach your on-call technicians. When we escalate a call, we can relay the information to the technician and provide them with the customers’ contact information so that they can follow up directly.
Learn More
Ready for an IT answering service you can depend on? We are ready to help. Contact our account team today to discuss your telephone answering needs and learn more about our affordable pricing plans.
