Denver Business Journal Technology Section

Help desks play key strategic, problem-solving roles

March 16, 2007 - by Gene Smith (general manager) of Mission Critical Systems

Ask people to define "help desk," and most will discuss the tactical role of resolving acute problems. But there's a much more strategic role that a help desk can fulfill: identifying issues in individual companies and/or with products and services that may need major repair or improvement.

Whether your help desk function is managed by internal resources or a third-party vendor, companies need to assess how well they're executing an overall technology strategy, what new technology merits consideration and how well their daily operations are faring (e.g., workflow efficiency).

Here are ways help desks can help accomplish these objectives:

• Spot company training deficiencies. If employees are calling the help desk about issues the company thought they understood, additional training may be in order. In this role, help desk feedback may uncover employee shortcomings that internal staff -- suffering somewhat from a "forest for the trees" malady -- doesn't.
• Spot technology shortcomings. If, for example, your company has VoIP and the help desk is getting a sizable number of complaints about signal quality, you need to find a fix. Sometimes, this is an issue of adjusting the bandwidths for your phone calls. Or, it can be router conflict with use of the Internet. Or, there can be an issue with the high-speed Internet provider.

Using the help desk as a research tool may help a company find the root cause of a problem. And the problem may reside within the company's own technology.

• Identify communication/personality-style challenges with particular employees. If certain employees constantly call the help desk, yelling at the top of their lungs, the company may have an attitude issue to address. If this is occurring with people who normally don't exhibit such behavior, the technology could be at fault for exasperating typically calm personnel.

Depending on the problem, the solution may be either communications training for employees so that they do a more productive, less antagonistic job of dealing with the help desk people (and perhaps others) or re-working/replacing a particular technology.

• Establish the help desk as a primary educational tool. Besides formal training with employees, the help desk offers a unique, one-on-one opportunity to educate specific employees. The individual attention may be more effective than group learning.
• Research how successful a particular technology rollout has been. This has two parts: the success of the overall strategy and the efficacy of the tactical plan. Carefully monitoring and aggregating help desk call information will provide useful information about both areas.
• Assess the willingness to use the help desk. Look at quantity, as well as content, of help desk calls when compared to overall rollout/implementation success.

If the new system clearly isn't working well and there is much internal grumbling but few help desk calls, this may be a clue that people are reluctant to call, either because they're generally demoralized or because they don't feel comfortable with the help desk.

Conversely, if a system deployment appears to be working well and many calls ensue, this could indicate a lack of pre-rollout employee training, or simply show employee comfort with their help desk.

• Use the help desk as a tool to evaluate overall employee satisfaction levels. Savvy help desk consultants can spot recurring attitude trends, both good and bad. By accurately capturing and recording this information, the help desk can perform an important attitude-measuring function.
• Take an active role in helping employees adhere to company standards. In many companies, skill sets are great, the right technology applications are in place, but there are no company standards in use.

People use styles and formats that aren't consistent (e.g., everyone's business card has a different font). With this problem identified, the help desk can educate callers about these issues as part of an overall fact-finding process -- and help build firmwide standards for such tasks as creating documents.

This can reduce the help desk call burden and free up resources to deal with other pressing issues.

Help desks can be a treasure trove of useful information about how the company is doing with specific technology strategies and tactical initiatives, as well as provide an overall report card of how employees feel about the company.

The key is to direct the help desk to gather the types of information you seek and how you want it reported. Properly configured, the help desk can be one of the most valuable business tools available in the marketplace today.

Gene Smith is general manager of Mission Critical Systems, a Denver-based IT management firm. Reach him at gene.smith@mcstech.net or 303-383-1627. The firm's director of training, Jenny Douras, contributed to this report.