Breaking the Monotony

It's your 20th support call of the day. Not one of those calls challenged you today. Every single one of them were straightforward fixes and while that should feel good that you quickly handled so many tickets, the feeling brewing inside you is nowhere near satisfaction.

When working in a help desk with a large volume of calls, each call can begin to sound exactly like the one before it. It creeps on you slowly, this number one enemy of your productivity, without even a flicker of realisation on your part. Before you know it, caller number 21 has to say "Hello" a few times to confirm to themselves they're actually talking to a human, because you've begun to sound robotic and you really couldn't care less if someone's password wasn't working or if their emails won't sync on their phone.

Pretty soon, it begins to show in your performance, your own personal job satisfaction, that lack of any feeling of accomplishment. Monotony has crept in and pitched a tent while you weren't looking.

It is a feeling that is slow to develop, and it is very easy to miss the signs. Over the years, I have come across many such colleagues who feel like the spark that was lit inside them, that drove them to bring their best to their work every single day simply went out and try as they might, rekindling that spark seems impossible.

Here are a few things I picked up along the way that helped me always keep that spark alive, both for me and my users and customers who deserve nothing less than service excellence, no matter when they call and who they speak to.

1: Why am I here? - Early on, I answered this basic existential question. Being a help desk agent can feel like one of the most thankless jobs on the planet. But it helps if you know where your role fits in the bigger picture. For me, I always reminded myself that a help desk is the face of the rest of the IT team for a user and I represented not just myself in that interaction, but the many teams that form part of the wider IT. For a customer, IT is IT. Which department you're from doesn't really matter, and a bad experience could lead to a very generic statement like "IT is always like this, never helpful" or some such similar comment.

2: Can I do better? - Continuous service improvement is not just a chapter in the ITIL Foundation exam. If you choose to live and breathe in a state of constant improvement, nothing is monotonous anymore.

• That call I was on took way too long, is there a better way to do this?
• This knowledge article wasn't really fit for purpose, who can I speak to about this?
• This customer seems to have called us too many times for the same issue, can we make their life better somehow by digging a little deeper?

Asking the tough questions and demanding better from yourself and others works positively on many levels. While instantly taking monotony out of the equation, it also helps you to interact, engage and bond with other teams within your IT organisation and with consistent efforts, you will be respected for these efforts.

3: It's a customer, not a call - As soon as you add this conscious realisation that you help customers, not pick up calls - everything changes and for the better. One of the things that became reflex action for me, almost like a prayer before you begin something was reminding myself before picking up that call that I was about to help another human being who was dealing with a challenging issue. Adding the human element to my consciousness helped to bring out the best in myself, and automatically ensured I delivered the best service, however basic the issue may have been (to me).

4: Switch your perspective - To you as a help desk agent, it might be "just a call". But for the customer calling you, something crucial they're working on is stuck because of whatever issue they're facing. Switching your perspective and putting yourself in your customers shoes through empathy helps greatly to focus on your customer and not on how intellectually challenging the issue is to you. I once had a particularly challenging call where a customer was trying to book a staff ticket and just wouldn't follow instructions. We were both getting frustrated at each other at one point, until she broke down and shared that her father had passed away and she was trying to travel urgently. It was an unforgettable lesson and a sobering realisation for me to always be mindful that we don't always know what the person on the other side of the call is going through, and when in doubt, always choose kindness over frustration.

5: Develop your business domain knowledge - The organisation you work for, like any organisation, will have multiple business units. Each of these business units has a purpose for their existence. They also have some critical business processes for which they use certain applications. Do your best to learn about the most critical business processes and the applications associated with these processes. That way, when a customer calls about a particular application, your mind is already drawing a picture for you on how exactly this impacts the customer, their business, their customers, the wider organisation, and ultimately the reputation, profitability, revenue and such other key factors. An ocean after all, is made of several such drops of water!

I welcome your thoughts and any additional advice anyone has for those out there in roles that threaten to get very monotonous very quickly, unless one is mindful and consciously finds ways to break past the monotony.