Help desk automation – who benefits most? Many of our international customers have support centers in the UK, and from time to time we hear that the UK is experiencing a considerable backlash against call center automation. To callers, the automation appears to offer nothing except frustration and delay. A succession of multi-choice questions to … Continue reading The role of self-help in IT support
Help desk software – the RoI challenge With so many excellent choices in the market, it isn’t difficult to choose a good help desk software product. However, choosing a help desk solution that is going to maximize your return on the investment is not so easy. An RoI calculation has two components – the ‘R’ … Continue reading Help Desk investment economics
Key classes of requirement for a successful IT support and help desk solution These notes follow some discussions we held during our recent Las Vegas hosted Issue Tracker training sessions about the requirements for the ideal help desk. Three areas had surfaced – Reporting – key support metrics such as incident resolution times, analyst performance, SLA … Continue reading IT help desk software – its impact on support analyst performance
IT help desk software – essentials for the manager As a manager, you look to your help desk installation to provide you with actionable reporting that enables you to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of your support organization, while informing your management colleagues. You will need trend information, such as reductions or increases on average … Continue reading How does your IT Help Desk software motivate your support team?
This isn’t as simple a question as it might first seem. Let’s look at the issues which need to be factored in to your decision. IT help desk response times – average and worst case The number of check-out staff at the local supermarket varies throughout the day. Some marts will try hard to ensure … Continue reading Optimal staffing levels for the help desk
Help desk incident prioritization: the seat of the pants method In a 50 employee organization, prioritizing activity in response to IT incidents will fall to the single hard-pressed individual who keeps the organization’s IT running. If a decision has to be made on relative priorities between two or more open incidents, it will involve a … Continue reading Setting Incident Priorities on the Help Desk
The IT help desk as a problem fixer In an ideal world, where nothing went wrong, and all computer users in your organisation were perfect users of perfect software running on perfect hardware, the Help Desk would, I guess, be superfluous. But that’s not the case, and the cloud isn’t going to solve everything either. … Continue reading The role of the Help Desk in your organization
Who’s training who? After the fun and excitement of last week’s three-day HelpDesk and Issue Tracker training course in Las Vegas, it’s time to review the project and begin already to plan for the next. There is always scope to improve in the way the knowledge is delivered, practised and tested. Logistics of accommodation and … Continue reading Who learns the most in customer training sessions?
There’s a stage in the evolution of many software markets when some players, usually larger or better funded, start buying up others. This might be to take out a competitor, or to short-cut the development of a much needed area of functionality. The result can be an apparently comprehensive catalog of functionality, and the prospective … Continue reading The dangers of amalgamation without integration