Should the helpdesk operator of an organization’s Technology department be that organization’s best technician?
The company for which I work currently has a non-tech manning the helpdesk line and routing helpdesk tickets to appropriate technicians. Our current helpdesk operator, while not exactly a tech, has been in the position for two years and has gained some computer/network expertise. This individual also knows which tech should be assigned a given helpdesk ticket.
A sideline lunch table debate has recently arisen around the notion that we should have our best technician manning the helpdesk line. That tech could then solve some of the problems over the phone or via Novell’s remote control. If a problem arises that requires a hands-on fix, then the head tech/helpdesk operator would outline the issue to another tech before sending him or her to fix the user’s problem.
I feel that our current system is better because while our head tech would be helping one user solve a problem, the phone would still be ringing as more users called for help. Also, when a typical user needs a tech to actually visit his/her computer (s)he’ll want someone who readily knows how to fix the problem. And don’t most companies put their most experienced tech-support staff behind a wall of less-experienced techs?
What do you think?
(FYI: I’m not the current helpdesk operator, so if I’m in any way biased about this, it’s not for fear of losing my job. 
)
It depends on the company but usually the first line of tech help are lower level techs. The idea being they are less expensive to employ than super techs. Generally they vet incoming requests and see if the problem is relatively simple (i.e. reboot your computer…that was all our ever managed to do to help) and if they cannot help they bump the call up. In this fashion you can have a dozen people answering the phones and 2-3 higher level techs solving problems. The alternative would be having a dozen higher level and more expensive techs manning the phones and that is not cost effective.
A common model is to have a 3-tier helpdesk structure. First tier did not help much, second tier could nail most common problems and third tier were the super techs capable of building a computer out of Lincoln Logs.
I’d say that your current system is likely ok. Whack-a-Mole’s is better. As a former help desk guy, and former “go to” technician, at this point in my career, I’d go INSANE if I was stuck on a phone.
The first level (person who answers the phone) tech is generally a newer tech. They are there to learn, and get experience, and move up to the “go to” level. Of course, if level 1 is swamped, and levels 2/3 are not busy, they should of course help with overflow. (in between reading userfriendly of course). 
Oh ya,
If you don’t want to keep the “super-tech” the fastest way to get him/her to “move on,” is to put him/her on a phone all day.
Dang post button… hit it too soon.
-Butler
At one company I worked at, the helpdesk was only there to record the problem and create a ticket. They were not expected to do any troubleshooting. This meant that no technical skills were required, but then again the descriptions of the problems were a little weird.
In my opinion, being a telephone helpdesk technician requires a different set of skills, particularly where you can’t see the user’s desktop.
Thank you very much for the replies. Any others?
IMO, (I have no particular helpdesk experience, but have been the computer support guy for the organization a couple times), it also depends on what kind of company and what kind of customers.
If you’re Microsoft, then the vast majority of your calls do not require incredibly technical solutions. Instead, they require the communication skills to figure out what the customer’s problem really is, and to communicate to the customer what they need to do (as well as the sense to realize when it is a complex technical problem and pass the call along).
If you’re supporting a complex and esoteric science/math program, and the vast majority of your calls are from computer competent people who are trying to do things with the program that haven’t been done before, then you’ll need someone more technical on the phone. But they’ll still need to be able to communicate clearly, even if their primary job isn’t reassuring and hand-holding the customer.
Yeah - the first line help desk is also meant to get a feel for the flow of an IT department. First level support would field the most calls, get familiar with who calls go to, respond to simple requests, get familiar with VIP’s, etc. Eventually, they would move into an area in the IT infrastructure, or advance to 2nd level support and shared duties.
Either way, no - I don’t think it’s a good idea to send your best technician to help desk, unless they are new. People at 2nd and 3rd level usually share duties because they have in depth knowledge of the systems - they don’t get as many calls so they rotate support or have an on-call person.
On another note: people have certain expectations of a help desk - if someone just answered the phone and helped you without shuffling you around, you could have a coronary or something. I couldn’t bear that.
I was part of a team that designed and implemented an internal helpdesk for a large financial company. We decided on the 3-tier approach, but with a slight twist. One 3rd tier tech was stationed in the first level at all times. They didn’t answer the phones, instead they walked the area and helped the 1st level techs close out tickets as soon as they were opened - kind of like a high tech sniper. They also helped in assigning severity codes to problems that could not be fixed immediately. We found that using this method we could close 80% of all tickets at the first point of contact. Problems that had to be escalated were much better defined and really severe problems were identified much quicker.
Solving that many problems at level one allowed our level 2 and 3 techs to spend more time doing the things they really like and less time dealing with user problems. So that none of the “super-techs” got burned out, 1st tier duty was rotated. It seemed to work very well.
Right. Suppose we’re running a museum. We would hire minimally knowledgeable people to answer basic questions at the info desk; e.g. Where are the bathrooms? or Are watercolors really water soluble?
If they ask a harder question, then they get referred to the next level of expertise; e.g. Why do they call it post-modern?
Questions like: Why are the brush strokes so important in this time period? would have to go to someone like a curator or maybe a restorer. That way, the folk with the highly technical expertise aren’t spending their days pointing people to the bathrooms instead of doing specialized work or answering specialized questions.
It may make the consumer go through more levels when they have a difficult question; but it means that the experts are more likely free to take highly difficult questions.
To a person who doesn’t know how to reboot a computer, being told to try that is a godsend. They don’t know that the person at the help desk only has two instructions: tell them to reboot or send them to the next guy.
This is all very helpful.
I work in a high school with over 2,000 students, around 300 staff, and over 500 computers. The Technology and Information Services Department has fourteen members. Three of them are full-time computer technicians. Four of them are computer lab managers who, in addition to manning their labs, help maintain the computers in their respective departments, including teacher and classroom computers. We have one person (whose job is at the heart of this thread) managing the helpdesk. We have one project coordinator, one audio-visual tech, one print-shop tech, a tech trainer, and our head supervisor. Essentially, we have seven techs that are frequently assigned computer-related helpdesk tickets.
As I mentioned, our helpdesk manager has been in the position long enough to solve many minor issues, but his/her main job is to properly log and route tickets to the appropriate techs.
‘Just FYI.
More responses are very welcome.
I spent several years working in the IT department of a college, first as a field tech and later on helpdesk. All the user-support field techs (as opposed to the server/network guys and the programmers) were expected to be able to work the desk, although a couple hated it and two of us liked it enough to do it full-time, and helpdeskers were expected to go out on jobs whenever needed. Of course communication with the users was the biggest HD asset, and we had a couple of field techs with strong accents who weren’t asked to handle the desk.
We used VNC (open-source remote-control software) for quite a few calls, and usually passed on only hardware or network jobs to others. (We did have a couple of users who could just switch the PC on and trash their system software to the point of needing a re-install, but that’s a different story.) So there was little difference in the level of expertise, just a different slant on it.
As people have shown there can be different models to how an IT department runs its Helpdesk. What happens depends on many variables so can be very different from place to place.
I will mention one other model I have found semi-common.
The Helpdesk is there to answer software related issues while the higher level techs are troubleshooters of the overall system.
So, if you want to know how to order a column in ascending order in Excel the Helpdesk is all over it. If you want to know how to merge a document into Word the Helpdesk are your folks. If you want to know what to do when sparks shoot out the back of your computer you get bumped to a system tech.
It is odd that I, as a network engineer, cannot help people with what they see as simple problems I should know. They will ask me how to write a formula in Excel and I have no clue. “But you are the super tech…you’re supposed to know this stuff!” Well, actually no. I am not supposed to know that stuff. I make sure all the backend stuff works (network connectivity, e-mail, backups, printers, etc.). As a consultant I am faced with hundreds of different programs across all sorts of different clients. Sure, MS-Office stuff is ubiquitous but I simply have little cause to use it so do not know it very well. If your PC melts I am your guy. If you have trouble doing a mail merge call the Helpdesk.
Whack-a-Mole said it better than I did. The HD I came from handled software, training, and most IT-related Web content. Field techs handled everything between the user and the wall socket, the network guys kept servers and connections working, and the programmers mostly ran the database.
I work at a college IT department. The majority of questions you get do not require major technical expertise; just a knowledge of the procedures:
What is my password?
How do I log on to Blackboard?
Why is the network so slow?
Where are the computing labs?
The helpdesk is a customer service position. They handle the simple requests. The more complicated ones go to technicians, who are often better used actually working on a broken computer.
Another reason or two to keep the higher-level techs off the phones:
They’ll go batty in a day or two after being hammered all day long with calls like
“Who do I call to order toner?”
“Hi, I uh, need a new password” (for what?) “The system” (which of the 65 systems we provide logon support for?) and
“I’m probably in the wrong place, but do you know…?”
And, you never want the user population to know your high-level techs’ names or phone numbers or the users will be going directly to that poor soul each time they forgot their password for the online timesheet system.
Well, i understand that it’s rather a waste of resources to have the best techs on the regular help desk, but my university seems to have decided that the people on the help desk should not be able to help with any problem whatsoever. To my knowledge, based on my own experience and on discussions with friends, every single time you ring them they need to generate a ticket and have someone get back to you.
If the help desk apparently can’t help with even the simplest problems, why not just have a system whereby i can send a email anmd have it looked at my someone who knows what they’re doing, rather than have me wait on hold for ten minutes, listening to bad music, only to then be told that all i can do is leave my name, problem, and phone number?
And don’t even get me started about some of the stupid software decisions the university’s tech people make. For example, the library sdubscribes to a number of scholarly databases that are for faculty and students only. In order to access these databases from off-campus, you can use a VPN client.
Now, remember, this VPN client was adopted precisely to allow people to access the databases from home. And what do they do then? They set up the VPN system so that is will absolutely and positively refuse to work if your home computer has a software firewall installed. Note, this does not just mean enabled; even if you disable the firewall, the VPN system will detect its presence and refuse to work. Un-fucking-believable.
I spoke to the tech, and pointed out that any intelligent user on a home internet connection should have a firewall, and that it was pretty silly to set up a system for accessing library databases that wouldn’t work with a firewall installed. He said that it was a security decision that was not his to make.
Johns Hopkins University: going the extra mile to provide you with solutions that don’t work.
Another issue to consider: how does somebody become and remain a super-tech? Not by manning the helpdesk full-time, that’s for sure.
The people who are best able to solve the really difficult problems with a particular software product are, almost by definition, the programmers who built the product and who are now maintaining it. Likewise, while the helpdesk people may have basic knowledge about networking and may know the general lay-out of the company network, the real expert is going to be the guy who designed and installed the network and who is responsible for doing the more complicated upgrades, installing new software, fixing things when they break etc. Hence, if you are currently the company’s best tech and you want to remain the best, then you should be spending the bulk of your time on building new stuff, doing non-routine maintenance on the existing stuff, and exercising and expanding your skills. Not on answering phone calls.
In other words, if your job consists of answering phone calls full-time, then not only do you probably not have the knowledge required to be considered the company’s best tech, but you are not really working on obtaining that knowledge either.
As a corollary, if you are currently working a help desk job and you feel that you have the potential to become “best tech”, then your first career priority should be to get away from that phone ASAP.