The Help Desk: Dumping Ground or Focused Performance?

Many help desks become the dumping ground for security, administrative tasks, training, non-support communication, change management, and ID setup. In addition, many second or third level support teams use the help desk as a shield to keep away from customer interaction. Most of these things are distractions that cloud your main purpose and prevent you from serving your customers effectively.

The distracted help desk causes stress for the managers and team leads that oversee it and requires a highly reactive management style. The successful help desk, on the other hand, focuses on the essential service desk disciplines and resists the urge to heap unrelated tasks on an already lean team of support professionals.

Staffing a help desk is seldom senior management's priority, so discussions are often more about outsourcing rather than adding the needed head count. This increases the importance of maintaining or reducing costs while improving service levels. To do this requires focus.

To lead your support team successfully, focus on these fundamentals to raise help desk performance to optimum levels.

1. Real-time handling of support requests
Spend time each week looking at call volume and email workload on an hourly basis. You will find trends for each day of the week and each hour of the day that help guide your scheduling. Analysts must clearly understand your expectations on phone availability time, email time, follow up time, and any special projects you assign. By using a schedule that you create based on call and email volume, you will make dramatic improvements in customer satisfaction. To be precise about your scheduling, use Erlang C calculations to predict the number of analysts needed per hour.

2. First call resolution
Few things will delight your customers more than resolving their support request when they call, or within a short time of their email. Your efforts to improve first call resolution will help them get on with their day and improve your interactions with them. In addition, it will lighten the load of the support teams that receive escalated cases. To make the most of your limited training time and money, focus training on improving first call resolution on an analyst-by-analyst basis.

Your measurements should tell you which types of cases you receive most. If your categories are too broad, you may need to look a subcategory to make these measurements meaningful. Working in order from the most frequent types of cases, tailor a training plan for each help desk analyst that will improve his or her resolution in the case types that make up 80% of your cases. Supplement this with a well-maintained knowledge management tool to further improve first call resolution (see Creating a Support Wiki for one approach).

3. Open case follow-up
Work diligently on closing open cases that could not be resolved on the first call. Set expectations that each analyst should update each case with status information on a periodic basis. Unless you can measure this and show analysts how they are doing, many cases will be left without updates and will frustrate your customers. Set service level expectations with your level three support teams and hold them accountable as well.

4. Process improvement
Spend time each week identifying, planning, and implementing process improvement opportunities. Research new technologies, training approaches, and trends in running a help desk. Automate all of your metrics. Innovate. This will allow you to improve the quality of your services while decreasing costs.

5. Career development
While you are focusing on performance and the quality of your services, make sure that you are satisfying another critically important customer -- your help desk analysts. They will provide the best service when they enjoy the work, are treated fairly, and are given growth opportunities. If you staff your own help desk, you need to think of yourself as a talent machine. You take entry-level people in, train them and help them to develop career growth potential, and after a few years, you help them find work in another department of your company as a result of the skills they learned on your help desk.

In summary, focus on the fundamentals. Say no to work that steals momentum from these essential areas, and create an engaging, professional support services team.

-Steve McElwee