¶ … Help Desks
Best Practices in Creating an Effective IT Help Desk:
Lessons Learned From the Enterprise Software Industry
The more complex the software, product or service, the more critical a role initial customer service and support teams play in ensuring customers' expectations are met and their experiences are positive. In the enterprise software industry this especially holds true, as companies will often invest tens of millions of dollars in new enterprise software to track progress of their goals, orchestrate new product development and efficiently run manufacturing. This is admittedly one of the most stressing areas of IT help desk operations as the users of these systems are often under extreme time pressure to get work done involving these complex enterprise IT systems and applications (McCormack, 2006). There are techniques for ensuring a very high level of customer satisfaction however, and three of these best practices are described in this analysis.
Best Practices in Call Center Implementations and Management
For many users of enterprise systems in their daily jobs, the myriad of options and commands can be both empowering and intimidating. Empowering in that these powerful systems ranging from Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems from Microsoft, Oracle and SAP to the CRM systems of Saleforce.com, SugarCRM and many others, and intimidating in that they have such an exceptional depth of features. The help desk must strive to become the trusted advisor to the users of these systems if this function...
In reality IT help desks are trading in the business of trust, and to the extent they can earn and generate it through consistently high levels of performance is the extent they are considered an asset, not a liability, to IT organizations. To aspire to be a trusted advisor and get beyond seeing IT help desks as a necessary nuisance, companies have to concentrate on creating a mentality of achievement, excellent and continual gains in performance against customer satisfaction metrics first, not just minimizing churn or creating metrics that only measure call volumes and close rates (Heller, 2004). With these thoughts in mind, here are three best practices to guide the creation and management of an effective help desk organization.
First, there needs to be a very clear set of expectations created for a help desk operation, including a clear definition of its philosophy of operation as well. From a practical standpoint, this reflects a mindset of measuring customer satisfaction first and not just how fast calls are taken and closed (Chang, Raman, Carlisle, Cross, 1996). In real-world terms, this is the step that defines what success looks like from a development standpoint. Defining just what will be accomplished and making it clear to senior management that customer satisfaction may cost more to achieve, will definitely take a longer time per call and may even adding headcount all sets a foundation for success. This is a very vital first step in that it also clearly communicates to the entire organization that the IT…
