Queue Management Basics- Part 1 of 4

Over the past 20 years of managing call centers, help desks and service desks, I have trained hundreds of staff members on how to successfully provide effective queue  management to ensure customer productivity, meet SLAs and increase overall employee satisfaction. In this four part weekly series I will give you a basic template for handling ticket queues.

• Part 1: Brief History of IT Support Desks
• Part 2: Queue Management: Friend or Foe?
• Part 3: Queue Management: Inside the Organization
• Part 4: Queue Management Scenarios

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions at [email protected] or 303-514-8958

Thanks,

Bob

Part 1: Brief History of IT Support Desks

The Information Technology industry is comparatively still very young.  Prior to the I.T. industry’s inception, experience had shown the evolution of an industry could have taken centuries to develop.  For example grocery stores of today did not start out as mega-stores.  In the beginning, grocery stores were small, singly owned operations providing only necessary items to those consumers just around the corner.  This model was in place for over one hundred years.  While this model was effective for their customers, the stores certainly lacked a wide variety of goods.  As the automotive industry grew, so did the ability for these local groceries’ customers to travel to other areas to get different products.  This new found availability reduced the revenue of the small stores.  In response, a few grocery stores combined their efforts and consolidated their offerings into a larger more cost effective model.  This change eventually evolved into the super mega supermarkets of today. 

As with other industries, the I.T. industry has grown and developed, but at an accelerated pace.  The major influence in the I.T. industry’s rapid growth is that its technology has assisted in the development of other industries.  Other industries either wanted or needed the technology to further their own industry and keep a competitive edge. This rapid pace of evolution has resulted in many underlying weaknesses. 

In the beginning other industries did not care about many standard business practices that were week in the I.T. industry because they wanted the competitive edge that I.T.’s products provided.  This practice made the I.T. industry an 800lb Gorilla.  Money was thrown at the I.T. industry almost without regard.  The maxim back then was “pay more, get it faster, and damn the consequences”.  This lack of regard and rapid growth gave a false overconfidence to those in the I.T. industry.             

As the pendulum swung back from the poor business practice beginnings of the I.T. industry to that of standard practice, these areas once ignored are now becoming a greater concern to these industries.  One of the first arenas widely seen was the “bottom falling out” of the internet.  During the internet boom many companies made decisions that went against standard business practices.  These companies quickly found out (and too late in many cases) that they could not ignore standard business practice any longer.

This brings us to today.  The I.T. industry is trying very hard to align itself with standard business practices (ITIL, SIX SIGMA, etc.), just like other industries (accounting, legal, purchasing, etc.) have been doing for hundreds of years.  While the I.T. industry has many areas that need concentrating on, for the scope of this class we will focus on customer service.

According to Eric Svendson of SCInc, (Svendson, 2003) the old model of support started with programmers creating a program and a very technical manual to go with these programs.  When users would have problems, they would call the programmers directly.  The programmers were not concerned about customer service, so their responses were along the lines of “have you read the manual?”

Once I.T. businesses figured out that the programmers were spending all their time answering phones rather than making new programs, management decided to move this “support call” to a secretary.  The companies soon found out that customers were not being responded to at all because the secretaries (having limited technical knowledge) would simply take a message and give it to the programmers.  Customers often went unanswered, because programmers were not “people persons” and did not want to talk to customers, they had to write new programs and besides all of the questions could be answered in the wonderful manual (and they knew it was wonderful because they wrote it) that was distributed the product anyway.

During this lack of response from programmers, some people did read the manuals and become more proficient with the programs.  These people became the “go to” people in their offices for questions on the program because other users could not get answers from the programmers and did not want to read the book. 

Eventually, companies gathered up all these “advanced users” and made an internal I.T. department.  Because there was no money for this type of endeavor, in the beginning, most I.T. departments were located in closets, basements and (actual) boiler rooms.  As time progressed these first individuals became more knowledgeable and eventually became system administrators, spending all their time on I.T. infrastructure.  Because these system administrators had limited the time to help people with problems the companies came up with the idea of a help desk to assist customers.

The first help desks were viewed as a stepping stone for limited knowledge individuals who wanted to get their foot in the door of I.T. and eventually move to system administration, programming or database administration.  The problem that arose from this model was one in which companies could not keep knowledgeable individuals in direct contact with customers.  While this model did facilitate technology growth, it diminished customer interaction resulting in customers’ dissatisfaction with I.T. in general.  At this point we started to hear terms like “helpless desk”, etc.

In the past several years a direction to move away from the help desk as simply the entry point to IT to one of a technically savvy, professional, single point of contact has resulted from a focus on customer service.  This customer service focus has changed from one in which technology was implemented merely for the sake of technology, regardless of whether the customer wanted or needed it. This has been a challenge to the industry because it is a dichotomy change for all those involved, from customers to I.T. management and every level in between to focus on customer service.

Although the organization and I.T. are aware of these issues and are slowly making a move toward a customer centric I.T. support model, implementing the process does have its challenges. One of the major challenges is that of knowing what best practices are.  Another is educating current (I.T. as well as organizational) management and staff.  Suffice it to say that there are some major challenges ahead for I.T. with regard to customer service and its role in the future of I.T.

Continued in Part 2 - Queue Management - Friend or Foe?