Helpdesk

There are some strategies that can help you, as a helpdesk manager, to improve the overall efficiency of your help desk even in tense and crowded moments. Some of the decisions that you will have to take are slightly radical, but they are appropriate for those situations when things area ready to go out of control.

An Organized HelpDesk

Having a well-organized and efficient helpdesk is every company's goal, but, often, budget restrictions put their mark on this. When a company introduces a new system that will generate more user feedback and questions, their helpdesk could be facing several difficulties. First of all, queue lines will lengthen and customers will have to wait 5, 10 or even 15 minutes on the phone before they are being attended. In most of the cases the companies won't have the budget to support increasing the number of helpdesk employees, in order to eliminate the above-mentioned disadvantage. Understaffed helpdesks offer very little customer satisfaction, as the operators are tired and overloaded with work, which diminishes their courtesy and productivity.

Helpdesk First Step

The first step you have to take is to organize the helpdesk so that things are kept to the basics, simple and efficient. The best idea here is to develop a simple and precise online knowledge data base that will focus on the most common requests addressed by your customers. If the online data base is far too complicated users will just take the simple path and pick up the phone. You want to give the users the information they are looking for without soliciting too much effort on their part. This will keep helpdesk phone calls to a low number and, consequently, this would increase their efficiency and the quality of the responses.

Simple Helpdesk

Making things simple is, sometimes, very complicated! This is why it would be a good idea to put together a sample group of users that can work with your helpdesk technicians to improve the information flow. Pick users that are affected by the change and have them brainstorm and come up with a good list of answers for the most frequent user questions. When the selected users and the helpdesk staff completes the list of FAQs make sure to upload it to your website. Again, concise answers are best and an efficient and user-friendly web navigation menu is a must. Chances are most of your users will first check for the desired information online. Only if they cannot find it there will they call helpdesk. Remember that today most people are computer savvy and they favor receiving information from the Internet rather than having to call an operator.

Helpdesk Calls

Your company should have very precise and well-defined items concerning average speed to answering helpdesk calls and average handle time. Helpdesk staff should be thoroughly trained to use these elements efficiently. Some strict temporal guidelines will improve service for all staff members, no matter how productive or unproductive they were up to that point. Your staff should have a very good notion on the difference between high priority and low priority cases. Urgent request should be addressed immediately and helpdesk personnel should deal with them promptly by opening a ticket and getting off the phone. When taking customer calls operators should know how to positively discriminate between the pressing issues and the more time generous ones. Clients who are in immediate need of assistance will expect a quick response, otherwise they will develop a negative image concerning your company.

The Helpdesk Team

The notion of "team spirit" should not remain an abstract one. Each and every one of the helpdesk team members must understand exactly how important their input is and that you, as a manager, value their help. Financial incentives are always well received, but they are not necessarily the best solution. High-level managers should take some time to spend in the Helpdesk area and socialize with the technicians and operators. Place a large amount of importance on each individual operator's job and this will make him or her give out even more. Make everyone feel like they are part of the team and productivity will increase.