Our friends over at GeeksAreSexy recently posted a review of the “10 steps to a better IT support process.” There’s probably not a lot of information there for people who already work in IT, but it does a good job of giving people outside of IT a picture of what the IT helpdesk has to go through.
“When users call for support, they usually feel helpless and may sound irritated over the phone. Always be polite towards them.”
And while there are always going to be technical support issues stemming from user error or hardware failure, these tips underscore a very important lesson. By the time the problem reaches the helpdesk, you’ve already got a ticked-off end-user.
And if that’s your first, last, and only method of finding performance problems, you’re leaving the important troubleshooting to the end user. The end user doesn’t have training in network performance problems, and even if he or she did, they wouldn’t have the information in the network’s performance because they don’t have either the tools or the access to see the network problem from the datacenter’s perspective.
And we’ve talked about this from the enterprise view – that is, that knowing about performance problems before the end-user calls the help desk leads to better customer satisfaction and a quicker mean-time-to-repair, but we often forget that there’s someone down at the help desk taking the abuse to begin with. And they have enough on their plates.
The helpdesk – the front lines of IT – deal with the problems that border on the absurd so that the network engineers can use their brains to figure out the difficult, challenging problems. They’re the guys sending out e-mails like:
“The copier on Mary’s fax machine is for the use of the Student Services secretary only. This policy is in effect even if every copier within a 40 mile radius is defective and both of your legs are broken in four places….”
“I replaced the printer in room 123. If you print to this and need immediate printing capability, write me an email. Any others will be added once the printer is put into the system. I apologize for the inconvenience, but the current printer was destroying everything it printed. The new printer is set to automatically duplex print jobs, let me know if this is a problem.
Also, If you have been printing out pictures of your abnormally large biceps, please stop and do that at home. You are making me jealous and insecure.”
The helpdesk – fighting stupidity on the front lines so that we don’t have to.
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