I checked my inbox history today 
to see how many help desk tickets I’ve opened in the last year. It came out to be 14 tickets which I suspect to be a pretty low number. You see, I am not the typical end user. Relying on my technical background and obviously Google to guide me in the right direction, I try to resolve technical challenges by myself. Only when faced with restrictions such as account permissions, is when I reluctantly default to a help desk ticket.
The wait period from when I get the email stating my request has been received till the oh so anticipated “your service request has been closed” email, can sometimes feel like “forever”. All I want is that the issue will be resolved so I can get on with my work. I suspect I am not alone on that one.
If we examine the IT perspective for a minute, one can only imagine that the team is facing copious amounts of help desk tickets on a daily basis.
With “Mobile Everything” trending and BYOD becoming a standard, it seems common help desk issues have to do with access restrictions i.e. “authentication denied” or “login failed”. The causes for these failures can vary from strong authentication password complexity constraints, proliferation of passwords and end users’ struggle to use the assigned authentication token properly.
Here are three suggestions to help resolve common help desk issues:
- Self Service Everything – Having a self-service portal can empower end users to be self-sufficient and resolve their own access restriction issues. Operations such as resetting passwords and/or token pins, reporting lost tokens as well as token activation will eliminate those unnecessary help desk tickets.
- Automate Now! – Complementing the self-service point made above, IT can reduce the operational daily management tasks associated with many of those help desk tickets and reduce the time it takes to close a ticket. The way to do that is to leverage policy based automation workflows when possible. For example: New employees joined the company? Welcome! Why wait for the new employees to reach out to IT and open a help desk ticket for requesting a token? With the right automation policy in place, all it takes is to add those users in active directory and the workflow will do the heavy lifting from that point forward. The result, added users receive an email containing a link to activate their newly (automatically) provisioned token by themselves.
- KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) – There is always a fine line between improving security measures to ease of use. Sure, IT can provide Fort Knox like measures but what good will it do if the end users can’t access those resources? This is why IT should think of their end users and try to keep things as simple as possible while still achieving the right assurance level. One way is to provide easy to use and friendly authentication options such as leveraging end-users’ personal mobile devices or pattern based authentication options. Another technique is to offer easy to follow training options covering the security measures in place and how to work with them. Short illustrated user guides or training videos are proven to be very useful.
To learn more on how Gemalto can help you manage help desk workflow and relieve end user frustration in the process, visit the SafeNet Authentication Service microsite.
