Six Ways to Get Smart Handling the Help Desk

Your help desk is staffed by productive workers. You expect your call volume to increase because of a new system update that affects a good chunk of your user base. But your budget doesn’t allow for additional headcount. What do you do? While the conundrum is hardly an enviable one, it isn’t the end of the world. In fact, there are some basic steps to take to get out of the bind.

1 User, help thyself. Put together a sample group of affected users, help desk technicians and project team members to brainstorm a sizable list of FAQs, and post the results on the help desk website as part of the launch communication. And strongly encourage the use of online knowledge bases and self-service ticket management capabilities.

2 Keep it simple. Make sure your online knowledge base is simple and easy to use by focusing on the 10 percent of problems that account for 40 percent of the calls. A too complex online knowledge base just brings users back to the telephone hotline.

3 Work those metrics. Make sure you’ve got very clear metrics around average handle time and average speed-to-answer, and train your team to use these metrics effectively. You’ll get more calls handled by the same number of people even those you already assumed were productive.

4 Go into triage mode. Ensure ahead of time that your help desk reps can recognize the difference between a low-priority and high-priority issue, and deal with the former quickly by opening a ticket and getting off the phone. Too many times, help desk techs do not discriminate the way they should during spikes, and the truly needy wind up waiting in queue excessively.

5 Bring on the superusers. Enlist some great business users early on in the project, and train them alongside the help desk. They can help with the surge of calls for weeks after implementations at their respective sites. Not only will this help you deal with the call surge, but it can also build a team environment between IS and the business at another level in the organization.

6 Show your support. Good morale boosts help-desk productivity. Most people leave a little in the tank each day, but help desk crunch time is when the staff needs to go home on empty. Showing how much you value your team will go a long way.