White Papers | The Help Desk … are you ready?
Top Issues to Consider when Building a Help Desk
As technology advances, pressure increases on firms to provide more extensive on-site support for their end users. Years ago, when we lived in a more simplistic systems environment, we could survive the "on the job" learning curve much more gracefully than is possible today. With everything seemingly instantaneous, firms must have an effective end user support system in place to remain competitive.
Today, many firms are looking to a more formalized help desk environment to provide users with support on a myriad of applications. Herein lies the challenge….
- Determining the expectations and responsibilities of your help desk
It is very important that the firm determine the role of the help desk. In doing so, clear boundaries must be set. Is your help desk going to cover all software, hardware and operating systems issues or simply specific applications? What is a hardware, software or training issue?
One of the keys to a strong help desk is the ability to determine what issues are retained "in house", and which ones are directed to other resources. Accept the fact that all answers are not going to come from a single source.
- Staffing requirements of your help desk
Establishing a dedicated staff to deliver these services is critical to the success of the help desk mission statement. Depending on the expectations, the firm may find that they need multiple people with defined areas of expertise. Help desk personnel must possess technical competence, problem solving skills and most importantly be "people" people. They have to be able to relate to the staff.
Increasingly, the market demands that IT personnel have a clear understanding of business fundamentals. This is covered in our article, "Further Evidence That Technology Consulting and Business Strategy Are Merging," which discusses the integration of business and technology consulting.
In some cases, help desk positions can tend to be high stress, thankless positions. Qualified people, with all of the necessary skill sets, are difficult to find and retain. Moreover, the knowledge of your actual working environment and staff personalities is something which can only be gained over time. Tenured individuals will markedly enhance the quality of your help desk. On the flip side, they cost money. In our experience, the benefits derived from long term employees greatly outweigh their higher salaries.
- Providing the proper support for your help desk
The help desk can only be as good as those support systems which are placed around it. This translates to establishing a methodology for handling calls (i.e. when to shift a call to a higher level of technical support), using technical resources (i.e. manufacturer’s knowledge bases – MS Technet; Novell Support Knowledge), interacting with pier groups members at other firms (user groups, listserv etc.), and providing support utilities (remote control software). It is extremely important that these individuals receive continuing education in all of the phases of their responsibilities.
- Operating tips for your help desk
In the perfect environment, each firm would create its own "knowledge base." At the very least, the firm needs to strive to log each of the calls in order to see trends or document recurring problems. The log can be maintained via specialized help desk software or on a manual basis. Clearly, the key is not the creation of the actual log, but rather the monitoring of the log. Ultimately, this all leads back to the management of the help desk staff and the existing support system for them.
- Measuring the success or failure of the help desk
In the end, the success or failure of this facility will be measured in terms of speed. How fast can these folks get the problem identified, and obtain the proper resources to get it resolved? The help desk staff must prove to the end users that they are capable of finding a solution. It is not important who actually solves the issue, but that the issue get addressed. Most importantly, that the user feels like he or she is being heard!
- Have a Commitment to Excellence!
