Help the help desk

There is no denying the damaging impact a poor corporate help desk can wreak. Sloppy service and long waiting periods can bring lasting dishonour to a company’s image. Whether the help desk caters for a company’s employees or assists customers, whether it sits within a company or is outsourced to some distant shore, the art of setting up and maintaining an empowered help desk is a mix of sophisticated business engineering science, psychology and marketing.

Frustrations can arise from many sources. A chief information officer may squeeze down help desk costs by outsourcing the more frequent call types. The CIO may also implement stricter process and more scripted responses but these steps can cause a worker backlash when they clash with the expectation that the help desk is a springboard for career development, learning and advancement.

John Ragsdale and Robert McNeill, US-based senior analysts at global research company Forrester, have examined some of the world’s most sophisticated help desks and seen them plagued with problems at many levels.

'There used to be career paths within IT and the help desk wasn’t necessarily the bottom rung on the ladder,' Ragsdale says. 'But it seems to have become that in many companies today.

'Often they recruit college graduates with technical degrees who view the role almost with distaste, seeing it as just an avenue to get a better job.' That can mean high turnover rates and less camaraderie.

It is hard to get companies to come clean about problems at the help desk front line – or even reveal the more human face of their help desk operations.

You need to turn to third parties who study and improve other people’s help desks to reveal folklore such as the enchanting tale of the JC Penney help desk agent who met her future husband during a help call or the story of the company board chairman’s son who was given a summer job working on the help desk at another company, only to cause severe unrest among his co-workers.

San Francisco-based Ragsdale has presided over three major help desk installs that each served many thousands of people in North America and has conducted around 40 help desk audits. He says the worst he ever saw was a three-month implementation at a North Carolina health care insurance company. After spending over US$250,000 for the help desk software plus service charges – it’s only real improvement was laser printing problem tickets rather than handwriting them. The printed out paper was still physically run  around the company in what Ragsdale describes as a 'sneakernet'.

It is not widely recognised that the help desk can be a stressful place to work. Ragsdale encountered problems so tough that senior agents laboured through an entire eight-hour shift, continued via mobile phone through the night at home and were right back on it the next morning.

'That’s commonplace for critical point of sale systems in a big organisation where an IBM or NCR person may be on-site trying to restore and save data,' Ragsdale says.

Dysfunctional help desk software also takes a toll. 'I haven’t heard of help desk people actually walking out, but when they have dissatisfaction with a software system and that’s what it takes to get someone’s attention, it can come close,' Ragsdale says. 'If it is so bad that the employees organise a protest, then they definitely get attention.'

Ragsdale has even seen help desk stress cause epileptic seizures and describes how volatile the environment can be. 'So far I haven’t seen anyone ‘go postal’ with weapons,' he says, 'but there is a lot of anger, frustration, storming out and arguments.'

One American help desk issues its workers 'magic slates' they can write on and then erase easily by dramatically lifting up the plastic to make the words disappear. 'If you had a really difficult user they would write obscenities about the user and hold them up in the air so that all the agents could see that they were dealing with a difficult person. That would somehow defuse the situation and allow them to keep their composure on the phone because the other people would laugh and commiserate,' Ragsdale says, stopping short of recommending the tactic but admiring its creativity.

One of the biggest causes of this stress is the help desk agent’s sense of powerlessness. Many agents are well trained but they just can’t change things they know are causing user problems. They can’t reset the system or change buggy software that generates calls. And, at a basic level, no matter what happens within an organisation it somehow lifts the workload for the help desk.

'If employees get moved, help desk gets more calls. If you suddenly increase hiring, they get more calls. If you bring in new systems, they get more calls. And they don’t have a say in most of these occurrences,' Ragsdale says.

Some help desks are looking for improvements by using voice to text translation and analysis tools. These new technologies analyse warehoused call recordings to find the root cause of problems and issue trends. Customer complaints, observations about competitors, reactions to an advertising campaign or even news events generate a fertile source of business intelligence.

Explains Ragsdale: 'All that recorded data can be substituted for market research. Focus groups do tend to be pretty expensive and leveraging the information you already have is likely to be used more frequently in future.'

Sometimes it can be quite challenging to even recognise a dysfunctional help desk because meaningful metrics are so elusive. 'I can’t even find a help desk that will tell me what the cost per minute is,' Ragsdale observes. 'One of my pet peeves about this industry is that there seem to be very few resources available for benchmark metrics.'

While system engineers can look at factors relevant to help desks – first call resolution rates and cost per minute are examples – the reality is help desks exist in very different environments with such sharply differing characteristics that 'when you glob all the information together actual benchmark numbers don’t mean much,' says Ragsdale.

It seems that consulting closely with the existing help desk agents before taking action is one of the best touchstones. Forrester’s Robert McNeill once encountered an 18-month install of a software-driven help desk that cost half a million US dollars from the early request for proposals through to selection and software instatement – but help desk agents were hardly consulted.

'The employees almost had to stage a walk-out due to the new system because a lot of it hadn’t been designed by the agents and was essentially unusable by the technicians,' McNeill remembers. 'After this was implemented, the company basically shelved the project, losing not just the cost of the software but also the implementation resources and time. They learned a lot about the importance of involving employees in their future projects.'

So why not just outsource instead and let someone else take on the headache? The right outsourcing decisions can be equally perilous and tricky. Deft thinking is needed on pricing models, service levels and contract negotiations. Expensive and embarrassing mistakes are quite possible if a CIO doesn’t manage to read existing help desk metrics accurately before engaging outsiders. Cultural differences only exacerbate the problem, especially for complex issues.

Outsourced help desk prices range from $7-64 per user per month or charging may occur on a fixed price per call or call bundle. But there are many other factors at stake as CFOs and CIOs are pressured to reduce costs. Good service level agreements now come at a cost and there is a growing emphasis on building an overall business case for keeping the help desk inhouse or outsourcing. That case must keep the focus on service to the customer. 'Simply outsourcing for cost reasons can have disastrous effects on customer satisfaction,' McNeill says.

To avoid entering awful outsourcing contracts ensure you define smart internal cost metrics so you have something to compare the outsourcer with, and never neglect to consider the outsourcer’s cultural fit. Remember too that the solution may not lie with the help desk itself at all. 'The help desk really is the failure of IT,' explains McNeill. 'More intelligent management tools now try to reduce the number of help desk calls and do preventative maintenance before a problem is actually announced to the help desk,' he says.

Indeed, the very description 'help desk' is fading away at some companies. It is now rebadged as a 'shared service centre' with more emphasis on marketing objectives than mere operational support as a cost centre. As the marketeers might say: Help desk, heal thyself.

Tips for an effective help desk

1. Define service-level agreements clearly for customer issues, with response and resolution time commitments based on problem severity.
   • A: Take input from customers on what the service levels should be to define sensible SLAs and gauge if existing SLAs are still appropriate.
   • B: Publish results on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis to communicate how well the help desk is doing and acknowledge success.
2. Have strong performance metrics so help desk managers can detect trends and monitor service levels.
   • A: This applies to areas such as the number of questions handled on the first call, the percentage of questions handled via a self-service website, the number of system outages (network downtown, dead printers, phone systems, etc.) and the overall number of phone calls to support desk by agent, day, hour, system, etc.
   • B: Solution vendors including Satmetrix Systems and MessageMedia sell survey software to automate customer satisfaction surveys.
3. Help desk automation software – implement a strong help desk software package to enhance workflow for ‘ticket’ creation and help ensure no customer issues are missed.
   • A: Don’t neglect to look at improvements from service delivery automation software, remote management tools, self-healing devices, integrated FAQ and knowledge management systems and the continuing price-performance gains in hardware. For example, email response management systems can allow help desks to respond automatically to common questions.
   • B: Solution vendors include eGain, edocs and Kana.
4. Self-service options – establish tools to give employees quick access to information and solutions via smart knowledge management.
   • A: Try to capture every question or answer in a knowledge base and share that with help desk agents and other employees to prevent wheel reinvention.
   • B: Solution vendors include Primus, eGain and Kana.
5. Thoroughly evaluate any suggested outsourcing venture. Be careful to properly assess the current help desk, decide what portion of support to outsource and select an appropriate pricing model.
   • A: Be sure to try to define material breaches of contract and set penalties for missed service levels that protect you and motivate the outsourcer to perform well and proactively in areas such as preventive maintenance.
   • B: The key preparatory steps are to evaluate existing help desk technology’s ability to deliver adequate return on investment, understand the existing IT asset inventory, document staff responsibilities and examine customer satisfaction ratings.

Further reading

• Making an IT Help Desk Outsourcing Decision, Robert McNeill and John Ragsdale, 29 March 2004
• Checklist for Help Desk Outsourcing: Structuring The Decision, Robert McNeill and John Ragsdale, 22 March 2004
• Help Desk Outsourcing Pricing Practices: Prices Fall Choices Abound, by Robert McNeill and Julie Giera with John Ragsdale and Adam Brown, 11 March 2004
• Help Desk and Customer Service Play Key, But Overlooked, Role in Business Systems Management, John Ragsdale, 20 June 2003
• Best Practices for Implementing a Customer Satisfaction Program for Service Centers or Help Desks, John Ragsdale,
  20 September 2002,  Giga Information Group Inc.
• Help Desk ‘Best Practices’ Focus on Providing Excellent Service and Strong Metrics Tracking, John Ragsdale, 6 February 2002, Giga Information Group Inc.
• Five Categories of Best-Practice Help Desk Metrics: Agent Productivity Just One Area to Track, John Ragsdale, with contributing analysts Julie Giera and Mike Dodd, 29 September 2001
  

This article was written by Jason Romney. He has worked as an attorney, a senior editor and manager at some of the world’s leading media companies and as CEO and managing director of a Sydney software technology company. He can be contacted at jason.romney@itvworld.com.

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