Help desk can be a real lifesaver for employees

A help desk can be a real lifesaver for employees, not to mention a productivity boost. A keyboard stops working, or Outlook crashes repeatedly, and a technician is just a phone call away. Even complex issues can in the main be resolved internally, and relatively quickly, without needing an outside vendor.

Yet, innovations in the help desk itself are often slow to evolve. Many large organizations all in all track tickets in complex or age-old systems that are not adept at pinpointing recurring problems, don't work then on the latest smartphones or tablets, and don't provide detailed reports about average call times or how long it takes to resolve issues.

Jarod Greene, a Gartner analyst, says, "Most corporate help desks are outdated." Many organizations are stuck using tools that merely report on the number of calls per day, month and year and do not have a clue about what he calls "feedback loops" -- that is, the recurring problems within an organization. That's a critical issue, he says, because over 50% of the perceived value of an IT organization comes from the help desk.

The help desk is stuck in the 1960s innovation-wise

So if the help desk is stuck in the 1960s innovation-wise, it's a good bet that IT's reputation could be suffering, too.

When calls are escalated, the help desk shifts gears. According to Rachel Moorehead, an IT professional assistant and supervisor at the university, calls become more than just a way to resolve problems.

Teaching moment

"Every call is a teaching moment," she says, describing how help desk staffers tailor each interaction to the caller's technical expertise. When an IT major calls in about a problem with a login to an Outlook server, for instance, staffers might explain how the logging files work. Even if the student is not an IT major, they however pass along tips -- and usually find that every student and faculty member is open to the advice. The university uses BMC Remedy to log the initial call, and at that time Bomgar for screen-sharing.

Because the support calls are focused on training and education, the goal is not necessarily to resolve problems quickly. The average resolution time for support calls is 5.17 hours, and an average screen-sharing session lasts 33 minutes. This compares to an industry average of a day to resolve issues of low to medium severity, according to Gartner's Greene.

The university took on 4,395 support calls in the month of November alone, customizing calls for the needs of the user and their specific problem.

Gartner's Greene says the university is on the right track in how it uses a tiered strategy. The first level roots out problems quickly; the second tier uses remote sessions to provide more thorough support. That's important, he says, because of the average costs involved. Initial calls to IT support can cost a company $1 to $10 per ticket; that's just for initial contact by phone or email to log the issue.

The point is not just to correct some problem or mistake, however to help ensure that the end user fully understands the reasons for the issue and in doing so will have the means to prevent or address future occurrences, King says. Ideally, this approach will lead to fewer help desk calls or "until further notice a better informed and more able workforce."

The company as well wanted more flexibility

The company as well wanted more flexibility. Nolting says some help desk systems are overly 'canned,' with automatic and robotic-sounding messages sent back to users. To make the communication more personalized, Peugeot Netherlands needed more features. For instance, Nolting says, he wanted a system that lets technicians send SMS alerts to users so IT staffers can communicate from wherever they happen to be in the building. Other goals included building a knowledge base of support calls and allowing users to create their own personalized tickets.

The company started using Kayako Studio, a collaborative help desk program. Nolting says a key feature is the ability for every agent to access all support-related emails. When agents create a ticket, they enter a user profile. Agents can at the time click an option to start a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) call, engage in live chat, or begin a screen-sharing session.

"We made extensive use of Kayako's mail parser rules, workflows and smart filters," Nolting says, explaining how tickets can be automatically assigned to specific managers and tracked consequently. Over the past year, he says, support calls have improved to a same-day resolution average of around 94%, an increase of 5% to 10%. And the total time to resolve support issues changed to 1.8 days on average, down from 2.4 days.

James Ross, corporate IT manager for the help desk, says the company has reduced tickets from 700 per month down to about 500. One method for streamlining: Tickets are grouped according to incidents, so technicians can address the root cause and prevent more calls about the same problems. They achieved this by monitoring help desk tickets and predicting problems or rather than waiting for them to happen.

For example, they used to be surprised by requests for new hardware or business software. Nevertheless now help-desk staffers can see patterns from the same department, around the same time of year, and can be better prepared for those requests, say, if bandwidth is a problem.

"Most organizations can't perform trend analysis on tickets and just react to them as they occur," says Ross, who adds that the company uses the help desk for facility-related requests, just as a building repair or HVAC upgrade, and may decide to start using it for human resources activities just as new hires and departmental changes. The company's help desk system requires staffers to log calls and track tickets, and there's no reason the same software can't be applied to monitor other types of activities.

What if you could click on a report for your help desk that showed the exact number of calls placed, daily resolutions, active tickets and the assignments for each technician?

Now, every ticket they enter, either manually or automatically, generates an automatic email alert for technicians. When a call comes in, the issue is tied to the user's workgroup and to his or her Active Directory listing for the correct Windows server. Because of this, the call can be auto-assigned to a technician who can at that time respond to tickets by email. The email integration is important, Ozier says, because technicians are not always at their desks. The software tracks help desk support though the desk is nevertheless relying on email.

The company's troubleshooting process has improved dramatically. Ozier says many tickets are automated and discussed over email, so voice calls last about 30 seconds on average, compared to 15 minutes earlier FootPrints was adopted. He says the time to resolve issues has dropped from about two hours down to just 30 minutes on average.

The help desk as well uses Symantec Altiris for secure remote session tech support, and Join.Me for ad-hoc support sessions on occasions when security is not critical, such as while a business presentation.

The main benefit of using Numara

Ozier says the main benefit of using Numara, even though, is the detailed reporting. Managers can find out how much time technicians are spending on calls. The IT help desk has become so efficient that Ozier says they now use the software for safety incidents in the manufacturing facility and for both maintenance and engineering change requests.

In each of these examples, one thing is clear: The help desk is more than a place to call and get help. Organizations are using support calls to teach users about resolving their own problems, to generate detailed reports to find root causes, and to help adhere to complex auditing requirements by making sure all calls are tracked and monitored.