Building a Positive and Encouraging Help Desk Culture

mail.jpgI've held a number of different positions at companies of varying size, but one instance clearly stands out in my mind. Several years ago, I had the distinct pleasure of managing a very sharp IT team for a mid sized call center. This was the first time I had ever officially managed a team, being traditionally a very hands-on tech guy.

When I began my adventures in this role, the company had rapidly grew from a small-sized operation into an environment with hundreds of staff members handling calls in each shift. It also meant that the current status quo for reporting and tracking issues (sending emails to a distribution list) would have to go; it simply didn't scale and had no way of providing the rich sets of metadata that one expects when handling problem resolution like a help desk ticket can provide.

I was challenged with fighting a system that was very simple for the end users but mostly worthless for IT. Broaching the subject of a ticketing system was met with tales of woe and that it "wouldn't work" based on past attempts. I felt, however, that introducing a help desk ticketing system simply required a few core principles to be successful:

  1. A simple process with as much abstraction away from "technical jargon" as possible.
  2. Buy-in and participation from the top echelons of the company; if the top brass were on board, their subordinates would follow suit.
  3. An empowered IT staff that could influence the look, feel, selection, and direction of the help desk system without fear of retribution or being iced out as wrong or "stupid."
  4. And, probably most important of all, faster resolution times on issues that went through the help desk through various synergies from related metadata (tracking hardware, software, and historical trends).

These were my four ideas, and I'll share how things went in my next blog post.

What about your ideas? Do you have a story to share that explains how you got your team on-board a new help desk system, and if so - how did you do it? :-)

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  • I had one particular time when there was a debate on choosing ticketing system A vs B when helping to set up an IT helpdesk team, and get them into measurable metrics.  My biggest argument boiled down to what the system was initially designed for.  Having worked in call centers and helpdesks before, I had experience where a ticketing system was shoved into a software that was more setup for accounting and sales, than for tech and I wanted to make sure this didn't happen again otherwise techs end up resenting the fact that they have to use the system to begin with.  We ended up deciding on a system that was more tuned in to IT people that we could then data mine to get the information needed for the finance and sales groups much easier than had we tried to force a different system onto the team.

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  • I had one particular time when there was a debate on choosing ticketing system A vs B when helping to set up an IT helpdesk team, and get them into measurable metrics.  My biggest argument boiled down to what the system was initially designed for.  Having worked in call centers and helpdesks before, I had experience where a ticketing system was shoved into a software that was more setup for accounting and sales, than for tech and I wanted to make sure this didn't happen again otherwise techs end up resenting the fact that they have to use the system to begin with.  We ended up deciding on a system that was more tuned in to IT people that we could then data mine to get the information needed for the finance and sales groups much easier than had we tried to force a different system onto the team.

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