Help Desk Challenges

Every successful IT organization has a help desk or service desk component to it.  Service desk staff are the front door to the IT organization - they take all the phone calls, emails, IM's and have to assure the user community their issues will be addressed. 

Help desk analysts are a unique breed. Not only must IT support professionals thoroughly understand enterprise computing systems, they must also convey their technical expertise clearly and succinctly to end users. Above all, help desk professionals must possess top-notch customer-service skills and stay cool under fire.  In addition, a good manager of the group to keep a pulse on the team.

To help you hire the best people for these critical spots, use your team to help interview. In addition, you need a ready-to-use job description that lists all the skills the perfect candidate will have, as well as the duties that person is expected to be able to do. In addition, you should have a series of interview questions geared to help you zero in on the right candidates.  People skills are key in this position.  You can teach a candidate all the technical skills they need to be successful but people skills are tough to teach - should come natural.

Of course, quickly and efficiently resolving users' technology problems is a challenging and often thankless job. While you're expected to manage a wide range of issues, from deploying new solutions to calming irate users, few resources exist to help you overcome not only technical hurdles, but interpersonal issues as well. The manager needs to be able to move staff around to tasks and not just keep them on the phone 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.  You can burn staff out, so keep a pulse on the team and have options for them to have a break from the phones.  That is why I like to put help desk, procurement, and desktop groups under 1 Director level position.  Cross training, knowledge share and many of the ITIL functions fit this model well.

I would also make sure you have the necessary tools in place to help this team be successful.  Incident Management, Asset Management, and the applications needed to manage these are essential.  Take a look at Service Now, it is a SaaS solution, it meets many ITIL functions, but it also does not require infrastructure support for the tool itself.   Nice solution, worth taking a look at. 

I propose the biggest challenge to the enterprise help desk is staffing, morale, and job satisfaction.  We manage our call centers for the business appropriate, but we don't always look at our help desk as a call center and it becomes a negative environment quickly.  Manage the staff workloads, morale, tool sets, workflow, and provide a success track.  A manager's goal should be to see their staff be successful and move on to other teams within IT, like tier 3 support, server support, staff training, etc.  Give them a promotional track.

I would also ensure the IT management team spends time with the help desk team and get their feedback, they hear from the user community hourly, so a great resource to collect feedback.   Engage the team, thank the team, and give them some recognition.

Keep it postive!

Scott Arnett
scott.arnett@charter.net