The Help Desk is a key area for an IT service that is often neglected.
Our industry is plagued by poor relationships between IT Departments and our customers. As service providers, we have little understanding of our customer’s current business, aspirations and difficulties.
The Help Desk provides one of the few effective channels of communication with our clients. The Help Desk provides a unique opportunity for us to understand:
- where our systems are faulty?
- where we are failing to provide quality service?
- which of our customers need training and support?
- where our customers are unaware of services that we offer?
- who our customers are?
- who are the organisation’s key information workers?
Questions for Help Desk staff:
- What kinds of problems cause the users most inconvenience?
- What kinds of problems occur most frequently?
- What do users want us to do to improve our offering?
- Which groups of users call us most often?
- Are there some kinds of calls that are really difficult to deal with?
- What else could we do to serve our customers more effectively?
We can then use this information to empower the rest of the department to:
- Serve customer’s needs more effectively
- Change the nature of work for Help Desk staff from the “same old thing” to more interesting problem solving tasks.