In our knowledge economy, access to ideas, help with innovative and critical thinking, fostering synergy and collaborative learning, are key drivers. This is like driving a car with a geographical positioning system onboard (new age technology), but at the traditional helpdesk, you are driving forwards all the while looking through your rear-view mirror. This is what most current helpdesks really do !!
So your firm has installed a helpdesk!, one of those modern technological wonders, you can track the status of 'tickets', you measure the average 'drop rate' & 'hold time', you know your first level resolution rate, and you have more SLAs (service level agreements) than you care to think about. Having planned ahead, you have a clear escalation 3 level process, you are building and busy customizing a canned knowledgebase, installed to bootstrap your 'corporate memory', you are proud of your 3rd tier validation & feedback rules, knowledge sharing is well ahead of the industry, you are mining your call logs for target problems and customers that need training, you are 'proactive' and have reduced calls by putting a FAQ on your intranet (self-help), your customer satisfaction ratings are creeping upwards. But are you really heading in the right direction?
Consider this continuum:
opportunities => suggestions => ideas => considerations => issues, => concerns => problems => crises.
Where does your helpdesk focus? What are you doing to capture informal innovation, keep abreast of subtle market shifts, track customer adaptations and product synergies, act upon market intelligence, leverage your firm’s weak ties? Moving from solving crises to learning about market opportunities is likely to be as important to your firm’s survival, future profitability and ability to compete as customer satisfaction, retaining loyalty and preventing re-invention is right now.
As your lowly helpdesk moves into the enterprise from behind the IT doors, give some thought to moving your focus from pressing problems to exciting opportunities. Attention to capturing innovation and market shifts, compiling composite, shared profiles and distributing meaning rather than just solutions may be the road signs to your next bonus.
In my experience helpdesks see themselves as almost totally problem solvers and solution collectors, even providing training is off the beaten track for most of them. This is sad and I lay the blame on the 'culture' of measurement that permeates almost all the helpdesks. Their eyes are on the metrics (calls waiting, longest hold time, time to ticket closure....) as these are wrapped around their SLAs.
There is a new role for the helpdesk, but one that has not arrived for most installations yet!, they can act as the corporate memory, connect people to ideas and to people with ideas. Using a help desk for creativity is often the last thing on the manager’s mind as they have cast themselves in the problem solving / fire fighter mold.
Imagine this:
You get a call just because someone is curious, they wish to know more, you have a living 'yellowpages' and refer them to xyz, you help them by suggesting some alternative sources they could try on the internet, together you examine their query from different points of view, you supply them with the company accepted terminology AND you solicit their feedback when they find the answer. There is some recognition system in place to help encourage contributions. This helpdesk's primary function is to gather & promote organizational intelligence and speed responsiveness to market needs.
Your helpdesk contains word association tools like Idea Fisher to help you brainstorm ideas with the customer, you can share a whiteboard and jointly scribble a mindmap, you have access to 'canned' stories, analogies and metaphors to help you and the customer stretch your collaborative thinking, At your finger tips is a bloki - a combination of Blog and Wiki to capture ideas and customer innovations.
The major focus at your helpdesk is to assist folks make connections and meaning.
Yeeeahd, it's csool
Posted by: Numit | February 21, 2004 at 07:09 AM
One of the places where BI is being applied is at the help desk. Help desks use the technology to query unstructured data. The hits are then placed in an authorial request, so a writer can turn the results into a coherent document.
Back in Windows for DOS 5.0, I remember being directed in the manual to call technical support for info on how do something. So I did. I made that call. They turned me into an expert and a committed customer. This wasn't accidental. They built the system that way around a content distributional strategy.
Typically, a tech rep can only help 80% of the callers. The rest are over his head. There have been many times where placing the call triggered my recall and I solved it myself. Other calls were about taking the emotion out of the situation, so I could solve the problem myself.
I rarely call help desks anymore. They can't help me. And, I'm not going to pay for help unless I can depend on it to be useful and worth the expense.
In one of my employers, technical support was built into the offer. We were not allowed to document the applications in a manner that would have reduced tech support calls. I won't say that we enabled the need for more calls, but as a company policy, the UIs couldn't be that good and neither could the documentation.
Design the roll of your technical support operation.
Posted by: David Locke | December 23, 2003 at 01:12 AM