How to Build a Winning Help Desk

Related to winning the desktop is creating consistent service delivery for help desk.? This is the customer service component of IT.? Help desk can often be viewed as an entry level position or sometimes viewed with less esteems as our prized developers or long tenured systems engineers.? This area should be given equal status and people working in this area should understand that the reputation of the entire department will depend on the care and skill with which they treat users.???

Help desk will be the primary way someone interacts with the department.? If trust is broken with the most basic of tasks how can the organize trust us to perform the next digital transformation. This is one of the bedrocks for the business to trust IT. Even a small percentage of dissatisfaction with help desk service can begin to cause ripples of rumors and malice.?

On the flip side, a well performing service desk team can make up for other areas that might be falling behind.? “That large enterprise project might be slipping its deadline, but good old Nancy in IT really got me going again when I poured coffee, all over my laptop.”??

Either of these comes down to the availability heuristic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic . This is simply the ease with which something can be recalled. When judging an IT group it is much easier to remember the most recent interaction and how it affected you personally vs. A much more complicated enterprise project and how it affected the bottom-line profitability of the company.? When weighing the success of IT the 2nd should be given more weight, but we are dealing with humans.? Everyone approaches issues from their own self-interest.? We need to make sure that each of these small interactions leaves the user feeling like they were heard and the problem was solved.???

For this area to succeed you need:?

• The Right People?
• Clear SLAs (Service Level Agreements)?
• A Tracking System?
• Well Defined Procedures?

The Right People?

Despite technical skills being involved this is where you should favor soft skills over technical skills.? If you are old enough to remember there was a Saturday Night Live spoof called Nick Burn’s Your Company’s IT guy. Nick Burns, Your Company's Computer Guy: New Tech Guy - Saturday Night Live .???

The psychology behind this phenomenon is well beyond the scope of this book, but needless to say we don’t want this type of personality in our IT organization let alone a front facing role.???

When finding people to fill this role I would look for individuals higher in socialization and support orientation.? People higher in socialization are energized by working with others.? Whether communicating via email, phone, chat or screen share this role will be engaged with someone constantly.? They need to be a people person first and a technologist second.?

The second psychological trait is a support mentality.? If you have someone who is a driver or wants to set direction, they will become very frustrated.? Often the help desk role involves a great deal that is outside the person’s control.? ??

Clear SLA (Service Level Agreements)?

Users have different ideas about what is an acceptable level of service.? The magic triangle comes into play here.? You can be good, cheap or fast, but you can’t be all three.? You must balance the three dimensions with what is acceptable to your organization.???

It is good to get some broader buy-in from the organization or agreement from your executive team on what that numbers should be.? The SLAs will help get you the resources you need to either get more staff, training or set an expectation that everyone can agree on.? It can be frustrating if you have a small staff doing an excellent job and a select group of users are complaining about slow delivery.? If you have broader buy-in you can simply state that the team is meeting the turnaround time based on the funding provided from the organization.???

Let’s look at each of the three dimensions to analyze in-depth.???

Budget?

The quality of service will greatly be influenced by budget.? Are most of the tickets simple and easily handled by an intern or entry level associate?? Do they require advanced knowledge of the business? Do you have a mix?? Do you need some items addressed by a senior person and another by a junior? Recording and measuring the types of tickets can greatly assist in making future decisions about staffing levels. The only error in differing from the budget would be overtime or service needs greater than your planning process dictated.???

?Turn-Around Times (Lead Times)?

A lead time is simply the time from when the customer identifies they have a need, and that need is fulfilled.? If I am locked out of my workstation and I call the help desk my lead time starts and completes when I can login to my system.? Users want shorter lead times. If you have long lead times people will be unhappy.? If a user has a service desk experience that is slower than the SLA they will certainly have a valid complaint. Depending on the status of the individual in the organization that issue may get moved up the food chain.???

For example, an intern who has an issue with their laptop not working for 4 hours might not be as important as the CEO. However, if the intern happens to be the CEO’s son you might still have an issue.? Which leads to the importance of looking at the big picture.? While the slow laptop is unfortunate most people focus on the forest instead of the trees.? As CIO that is where you want to spend your time.???

When reporting on lead times I like to use a chart like the following.? It is very intentional with the information included and removes all other unnecessary information.? The first and most important is a line across the top that says, “Turnaround Goal”.? Most executive teams are drowned in data. Even though I just said everyone should know the goal, people forget and by putting it right on the chart everyone looking at the chart knows the goal.???

In this chart I have two different categories.? One chart is for everyday traditional “Help Desk” and the other is what I call Dev Support.? They have quite different resources assigned to each queue.? In this example, I saw there was an issue with the “Dev Support” queue in early January 2020.? Adjustments were needed to get it back on track.???

There can be lots of reasons for a slow turnaround times, but another area to review is total volume.? In this case volume was steady and turnaround time from above was slow.??

Quality?

You have a budget everyone agrees with and the team is returning tickets quickly, but what about the quality of that service? How well is the team resolving user requests? As the CIO you may have few occasions to use the help desk yourself. How can you turn this qualitative experience into a quantitative goal for the team or know who is doing a good vs. who needs training or replaced???

The best way to do this is with surveys. I like to use two distinct types of surveys. One is more tactical while the other is strategic.??

Quality – Tactical?

Simply at the end of each help desk ticket give the user a chance to rate the quality of the service. It needs to be quick and insanely easy. It should have the choice to leave a comment and link back to the original ticket ID for further analysis.?

Example:?

How was your service on {Ticket Name Here}?? Good | Neutral | Bad?

For further research you can Google CSAT score. You want the team to target a percentage of good responses for tickets. For example, the goal could be to get 98% green scores.??

The other important part is the ability to tie it back to the original ticket. This gives you the ability to see a much richer picture. Do you have one support rep that always gets the red tickets? Is there a user that is just angry with the world and rates everything bad regardless of speed and who helps them??

How you handle the neutral and bad tickets as a leader is extremely important.? On the one hand you want to deliver such amazing service that this never happens.? On the other side this can be a terrific source of learning and development.???

Let’s start with the service team. Primarily, let them know that bad or neutral tickets are ok.? They are the source of learning and feedback. On the red tickets I like to hold a blameless post-mortem on the ticket.? A blameless post-mortem is where the team views the issue from the perspective of performance improvement.? If the same event happened again what would we do different? Is there a way to prevent the issue from happening in the first place?? You must go in with the mindsight that everyone is doing their best and has positive intentions.? Initially, people may feel defensive or be quick to shift blame to the user. Even if the user messed up what can we do to prevent it. Can we do more training? Put in security controls? Communicate more effective????

Let’s walk through a real-life example. We had a ticket where the user was reporting an issue with a customer.? Sometimes, IT (Information Technology) needs to respond directly to the client and sometimes the business unit needs to respond.? In this case IT responded by closing the ticket and telling the business unit how to interact with the customer.? Next came the frowny face.? The business unit thought IT should have contacted the customer directly.? Upon reviewing the ticket, I could have made a case for either.? The team decided that on future tickets they will make sure they clear up any ambiguity before proceeding.???

In the earlier example, notice that I said the team decided. As the senior leader in the group the solution may be painfully obvious.? Part of the process is asking questions and making the team think. You can’t be there for every single item. To the best of your ability, you don’t want to solve for that specific instance. You want the team to improve their decision making. They won’t improve if you are stepping in and doing it for them every single time.? You still get veto, but when you do veto make sure it is clear why.?

We also make it a policy to have the help desk manager or other senior person follow-up on negative tickets. Continuing with our example from above we called the user and asked that she clarify in the future if she wants the answer or wants us to respond directly to the client. She was agreeable and thought that would limit future friction.? The other benefit is that users feel heard and that you take their feedback serious. You want to encourage feedback. If you are dismissive of negative feedback or don’t follow through people will stop doing it because they feel like they are not being heard.???

Quality Management?

Even with blameless post-mortems sometimes people just don’t hit the mark. User feedback is a wonderful way to supply objective feedback. When you use feedback scores as part of a goal or review it becomes extremely easy. You can write a goal of a 95% positive rating on satisfaction scores. If someone doesn’t hit the established mark, then it is much easier to have a conversation on how to improve or that maybe this isn’t the right career choice for them. It takes a lot of the subjectivity out of the situation. It isn’t the manager being mean or unfair. It is just math. If there is an established record of accomplishment of others on the team hitting the mark it becomes an even easier discussion.???

Without a system like this you tend to rely on anecdotal or one-off feedback. It is a little harder to separate a single event from everyday experience.? When you first implement a system place less weight on the first score and look at how the score moves over the next measurement period.??

I once had an employee who I knew was not making users happy. He managed up well, was extremely personal, but I kept hearing grumblings. I implemented the system. When I presented the first scores it was a little shocking to both of us. The scores were atrocious, and I had quantitative knowledge of just how bad the issue had become. The employee had an emotional reaction and took the weekend to mull it over. When he came back on Monday, he decided that he wanted to make this a personal challenge. I was ecstatic. He and his manager worked together. The next review cycle he had the biggest improvement of the entire team.?

Quality Management Timing?

This tactical feedback at the individual ticket is best delivered as soon as possible. The analogy I like to use is that of coaching in sports. Coaches supply feedback in real-time. Instead of letting a player perform drills with bad form a good coach will correct the form quickly. As the old saying goes, practice makes permanent. We want to remove any poor habits as quickly as possible. If we wait the person will be unaware and just keeping the same mistake over and over. Imagine in the help desk incident above if we kept closing tickets without involving the customer. The staff person would be frustrated every time we closed a ticket instructing her on what to do next. We think we’re providing her with great instruction, and she thinks we are just lazy. Quick feedback, changes implemented leads to future happier end users.??

Quality Strategic?

In addition to the real-time feedback, I also like to use an annual or bi-annual NPS (Net Promoter Score) style assessment. Simply rate the team member from 1-10 and leave a comment. Why is this necessary if we are already supplying the real-time feedback? It gives everyone a chance to think deeper and really starts to show who on the team is supplying superior service.? The real-time feedback is very transactional. Some users can be extremely thoughtful with feedback and supply opportunities for growth.? When it comes to bonuses, raises and other incentives it is a quantitative measure of how well services are being delivered in the eyes of the user.??

Let’s say I have two separate developers. Both complete their work on-time and pass all the tests. What separates the two of them? Did one help the business think through the problem and supply more insight? Were they pleasant to work with? Did they think creatively or deliver something better than expected? Often the bigger picture NPS score will reflect this.??

Knowledge Bases?

A knowledge base is simply a repository of information that is accessible by both the help desk team and end users. The importance of this tool is twofold.??

Helping End-Users?

Inevitably, someone will need to work late at night and miss a key piece of information on how to do something or break their phone and need to transfer their MFA (Multi Factor Authentication) to a new device at the worst possible time. By having a knowledge base up and available it allows end-users to do self-service it can alleviate a great deal of frustration.??

Help Desk Team Members?

It also creates scale for the team by allowing the shared collective intelligence of everyone to be realized. At one point I had the realization that if I did not get the information that was in my head into written form I would fail. I would have time to train new people or get any leverage. By putting all the key bits of information in a searchable format. New team members can be knowledgeable and solve problems on their own. Yes, Google has many answers, but there is so much configuration in enterprise environments that is specific to that enterprise that you will need your own knowledge base.??

Video, Video, Video?

With the proliferation of online meeting software, everyone can easily record a meeting with themselves and make a video. While some articles might be fine for short text, such often a video is much easier to absorb. I would like to share the following story to illustrate the point.??

In the summer of 2021, a rock hit my windshield. I was in a remote part of Michigan and there was not a glass repair place anywhere nearby, but there was an AutoZone. For $10 I could fix the repair myself. I pulled out the instructions and read the following,??

Unscrew and remove the pressure driver from the resin chamber to release any air trapped in the chamber. Re-insert the pressure driver and screw down again to displace any air remaining in the break. To determine if the repair resin has been absorbed into the break look at the glass from an angle of about 45 degrees.??

I had to read this several times and did I mention that I was impatient. Instead, I hit YouTube and saw exactly what they were talking about in 30 seconds. Creating videos is now extremely easy. I tell the team to not make a production out of it. Just create a quick and dirty video showing the exact thing someone needs to do.??

Chatbots?

I would also put chatbots under the category of self-service or knowledge base. It is an interactive version of a knowledge base that can leverage additional features to create a tremendous experience. For smaller organizations there may not be enough scale to justify the cost of the service coupled with the time to program. However, if there is a smaller number of queries that need to be answered often chat bots can supply a rapid response to questions and allow the organization to scale efficiently.??

Enterprise Checklists??

Despite the power of automation, sometimes things just need to be manually done. Even if it is, “click this button to do the automation.” Checklists create consistency and accountability. People forget, get distracted or otherwise just don’t do certain things because reasons. I like the idea of linking checklists to help desk systems, laptops or the service in question. Let’s walk through a hypothetical example to see how this plays out.??

Enterprise Checklist for New User?

Create User in Directory – How To Link | Initials | Date Time?

Add Phone Extension – How to Link | Initials | Date Time?

Give Permissions Based on Role - How to Link | Initials | Date Time?

Schedule Laptop Delivery Date – How to Link | Initials | Date Time?

Notice a brief description of what needs to be done. A link that points to the knowledge base in case someone needs a refresher or is new. The initials and date time supply the accountability. Even better is a spot for someone to post a screen shot of their work.??

Enterprise Walkthrough?

A help desk ticket comes in from HR showing a new user is starting. The service person looks up the proper checklist and associates it to the ticket. The new user is added to the system along with their device. The service person can now confidently know they have completed all the steps.??

Where this is helpful is when something goes wrong. The new person’s manager calls and shows an error, we can go back to the checklist to make sure we captured everything. If there is an error we can adjust the checklist to ensure future errors don’t happen.??

Help Desk vs. Service Desk?

As organizations grow the volume of work increases and so does the need to specialize. One of the ways organizations do this is through the distinction of a service desk versus a help desk. When you create this distinction the help desk is typically used to handle break / fix or hardware type issues. The service desk handles how to questions. For example, my laptop won’t boot. That is help desk. How do I efficiently get this data from Excel into our CRM system? That is service desk.??