9 Common IT Help Desk Problems (and How to Fix Them)

Your IT team just spent 23 minutes routing a password reset request through three Slack threads, a Teams chat, two email chains, and a spreadsheet that nobody remembers creating. Meanwhile, a laptop provisioning request from last week is still bouncing between IT, HR, and Finance with no clear owner.

These aren't random failures. They're symptoms of help desks built on manual coordination, scattered channels, and knowledge gaps that compound as companies grow. The good news: every one of these problems has a fix that doesn't require hiring more people or buying more tools.

Here are the nine most common IT help desk problems and practical ways to solve them.

1. Requests Get Lost Across Slack, Email, and Teams

Problem: When employees need help, they reach for whatever's fastest: a Slack DM, a Teams message, an email, maybe a tap on the shoulder. From their perspective, the request is submitted. From IT's perspective, it's invisible.

Impact: Your team spends the first chunk of every workday hunting for requests across channels instead of resolving them. A single laptop issue might live in three Slack threads, an email chain, and a mental note someone made during a hallway conversation. Critical requests slip through because nobody knows they exist.

Solution: Meet employees where they already work. Instead of forcing everyone into a ticketing portal they'll forget exists, use chat-native ticketing that converts Slack and Teams messages into trackable requests automatically. The employee just sends a message; the system handles the rest. Pair that with a unified service desk that centralizes requests regardless of where they originated.

How Siit helps: Siit captures requests from Slack and Teams automatically, funneling everything into one queue. Employee 360 profiles pull context from connected systems, so you see the requester's department, manager, devices, and permissions without switching tabs. The hunting stops.

2. Every Ticket Needs Manual Sorting and Assignment

Problem: Every ticket that lands in your queue requires someone to read it, figure out who should handle it, assign it, and hope they got it right. Multiply that by a few hundred tickets per week, and you've got a full-time job that produces no actual resolutions.

Impact: The manual approach ignores valuable context. When someone submits a request, you probably don't have time to look up their department, check their device history, or see if they've had this same issue before. Routing decisions happen blind, and tickets bounce between teams until they land somewhere useful.

Solution: Document your routing logic first. Which request types go to which teams? What priority levels matter? What requester attributes should influence routing? Once you've mapped that out, automate it with AI-powered triage that reads incoming requests, categorizes them based on content, and routes them to the right team using your rules.

How Siit helps: Siit's triage considers requester context (role, department, history) that you'd never have time to look up manually. Requests land with the right person on the first try, and your team stops playing traffic cop.

3. Approvals Take Days Because They're Stuck in Inboxes

Problem: A software access request shouldn't take a week, but when it needs Finance confirmation, HR verification, and IT sign-off, that's exactly what happens. Each approval sits in someone's inbox until they remember to check it.

Impact: The bottleneck isn't that approvers are slow; it's that the approval process fights against how people actually work. Approvers miss emails because they get hundreds daily. They forget to click buttons because the request isn't where they're already working. They sit in back-to-back meetings with no time to context-switch into a ticketing system.

Solution: Bring approvals into the tools approvers already use. In-chat approval actions let managers approve or reject directly from Slack or Teams with a single click. They see the full request context without leaving their workflow. Add automatic escalation so requests don't die in someone's inbox while they're on vacation.

How Siit helps: Automated approval workflows handle the routing and sequencing, sending requests to the right approvers with all the context they need to decide quickly. If a request stalls beyond your defined threshold, backup approvers get notified automatically.

4. Your Team Answers the Same Questions Over and Over

Problem: Your knowledge base probably has the answer to "how do I connect to the VPN." The problem is that finding that article takes longer than just messaging IT, so employees take the path of least resistance and your team answers the same questions repeatedly.

Impact: Each interruption costs more than the time to answer. When an admin stops working on infrastructure to explain VPN setup for the fifteenth time this month, that's context-switching overhead on top of the actual response time. Strategic work gets delayed because urgent-but-simple questions keep jumping the queue.

Solution: Make documentation easier to find than asking. AI-powered article suggestions surface relevant knowledge base content as employees type their requests. Before they even submit, they might find their answer. For questions that do come through, use AI agents to handle common requests without human intervention.

How Siit helps: Siit's AI agents pull from your documentation (via Confluence and Notion integrations) to answer questions accurately. Your team only sees the requests that actually need human judgment.

5. Password Resets Eat Up Hours Every Week

Problem: Password resets and account lockouts are the cockroaches of IT support: low complexity, high volume, and seemingly impossible to eliminate. They're simple enough that any Tier 1 tech can handle them, but they consume a disproportionate share of help desk capacity.

Impact: Every minute your team spends on resets is a minute not spent on security improvements, infrastructure upgrades, or the projects that actually move the organization forward. You're paying skilled technicians to do work that a well-configured system could handle automatically.

Solution: Self-service is the answer, but it only works if it's genuinely easier than asking IT. Integrate directly with your identity provider so employees can reset their own passwords without filing a ticket or waiting for someone to verify their identity manually.

How Siit helps: Siit's Okta integration and JumpCloud integration enable self-service password resets. AI-powered workflows handle account lockouts automatically, verifying identity and executing the reset without IT touching it. Your team gets those hours back for work that actually requires their expertise.

6. You Can't See Where Your Team's Time Actually Goes

Problem: When you can't see patterns in your request data, you're making staffing and automation decisions based on gut feel. You might sense that Mondays are busier, but you can't prove it. You might suspect a particular system generates most of your tickets, but you can't make the business case for replacing it without data.

Impact: This visibility gap directly contributes to burnout. If you don't know that password reset requests spike every Monday morning, you can't staff appropriately. If you can't show leadership in your SLA compliance numbers, you can't demonstrate that your team is understaffed. You're flying blind while trying to convince people you need more resources.

Solution: Start tracking the basics: request volume by category, resolution times, first-contact resolution rates, and SLA compliance. Look for patterns that suggest systemic issues worth addressing. If one application generates 30% of your tickets, that's a conversation with the vendor or a case for replacement.

How Siit helps: Siit's analytics and reporting surfaces these patterns automatically. Dashboards show where time is going, which request types are growing, and where automation would have the biggest impact. When you can show leadership that automating password resets would save 15 hours per week, the investment case makes itself.

7. Cross-Departmental Requests Require Too Much Coordination

Problem: The most painful requests aren't technically complex; they're organizationally complex. A new hire needs IT to provision accounts, HR to verify employment, Finance to set up payroll, and a manager to approve access levels. A laptop for a contractor requires IT, HR, Finance, and Facilities to all play their part. IT becomes the human router, chasing down stakeholders who don't talk to each other.

Impact: This coordination overhead scales terribly. As your organization grows, the number of cross-departmental requests grows faster because more people means more edge cases, more approvals, and more handoffs. Onboarding turns into a week-long ordeal where new hires sit idle waiting for access. Offboarding becomes a compliance risk when departing employees retain system access because manual coordination across identity providers, SaaS apps, and device management rarely achieves complete revocation.

Solution: Treat cross-departmental workflows as first-class citizens, not exceptions to route around. Map out the common multi-team requests (new hire setup, contractor onboarding, equipment purchases, offboarding) and build workflows that handle the coordination automatically. For employee lifecycle events specifically, use event-driven automation: when HR marks someone as hired or terminated in your HRIS, that event should trigger the entire workflow without handoffs or tickets.

How Siit helps: Siit's cross-departmental workflows manage handoffs between teams without manual coordination, keeping all stakeholders informed as requests progress. The unified service desk spans IT, HR, and Finance rather than forcing each team into siloed systems. For lifecycle automation, HRIS integrations with BambooHR, Workday, and Rippling sync employee status changes automatically, while MDM integrations with Jamf and Kandji coordinate device access. New hires are productive on day one, and departing employees lose access the moment they should.

8. Escalated Tickets Arrive Without Any Background

Problem: When a ticket escalates from Tier 1 to Tier 2, the context should travel with it. Instead, the Tier 2 engineer opens a ticket with a two-sentence description and no background, then spends the first ten minutes asking the same questions Tier 1 already asked.

Impact: The employee repeats their story for the third time and wonders why IT can't get its act together. Cross-departmental escalations compound this: when an IT issue requires HR input or Finance approval, neither team has the full picture. They're making decisions based on fragments of information passed through a game of telephone.

Solution: Context preservation requires two things: capturing relevant information upfront and ensuring it travels with the ticket. Pull employee data (department, manager, device details, permissions, request history) automatically when a ticket is created, and keep it visible as the ticket moves between teams.

How Siit helps: Siit enriches tickets with employee context from connected systems the moment they're created. Cross-department collaboration features maintain that context as requests move between IT, HR, and Finance. Everyone sees the same information, and nobody wastes time re-gathering what's already known.

9. Nobody's Available When Employees Need Help at Night

Problem: Your help desk operates 9-to-5, but your employees don't. The engineer debugging a production issue at 11 PM can't wait until morning for a password reset. The sales rep preparing for a client meeting in Tokyo needs access to a file share right now, not in eight hours.

Impact: For global organizations, this creates two tiers of support: fast help for headquarters time zones and delays for everyone else. Remote employees and international teams learn to work around problems because waiting for IT isn't viable, and those workarounds often create security risks.

Solution: You don't need to staff a 24/7 help desk to provide 24/7 support. Most after-hours requests are routine: password resets, access requests, common questions with documented answers. These don't require human judgment; they require automation. AI agents can answer common questions and resolve routine requests at any hour.

How Siit helps: Siit's automated workflows handle standard requests regardless of when they're submitted. Complex issues get queued for the appropriate team with immediate acknowledgment, so the employee knows their request is tracked even if it won't be resolved until morning.

Moving From Firefighting to Strategic IT

These problems share a common thread: manual coordination eating time that should go toward strategic work. Every hour spent hunting for requests, routing tickets, chasing approvals, and answering repetitive questions is an hour not spent on security improvements, infrastructure upgrades, or the projects that actually move your organization forward.

Siit eliminates that coordination overhead through AI agents that execute complete workflows across IT, HR, and Finance. The platform works directly inside Slack and Teams, converting messages into trackable requests while AI handles routing, approvals, and resolution for everything that doesn't require human judgment.

See how Siit works. Get a demo.