Handling increased Help Desk traffic
Hopefully, your help desk is staffed by productive workers. Sometimes, a situation arrises,
when you expect your call volume to increase because of a new system implementation that
affects a good chunk of your user base. But what if your budget doesn't allow for additional
headcount? What do you do?
Tips for handling increased Help Desk traffic
- Help your users help themselves. Put together a sample group of affected users, help desk
technicians and project team members to brainstorm a sizable list of FAQs, and post the
results on the help desk website as part of the launch communication. Strongly encourage
the use of online knowledge bases and self-service ticket management capabilities.
- Keep things simple. Make sure your online knowledge base is simple and easy to
use by focusing on the 20 percent of problems that account for 80 percent of the calls.
A complex online knowledge base just brings users back to the telephone hotline.
- Check your Help Desk Metrics. Make sure
you've got very clear metrics around average handle time and average speed-to-answer, and
train your team to use these metrics effectively. You'll get more calls handled by the
same number of people, even those you already assumed your team is productive.
- Go into triage mode. Ensure ahead of time that your help desk reps can recognize
the difference between a low-priority and high-priority issue, and deal with the former
quickly by opening a ticket and getting off the phone. Too many times, help desk techs
do not discriminate the way they should during spikes, and the truly needy wind up waiting
in queue excessively.
- Use your superusers. Enlist some great business users early on in the project,
and train them alongside your help desk staff. They can help with the surge of calls for
weeks after implementations at their respective sites. Not only will this help you deal
with the call surge, but it can also build a team environment between IS and the business
at another level in the organization.
- Keep morale high. Good morale boosts help desk productivity. We never spend
enough time with our teams, and this is the perfect opportunity for the CIO to spend some
quality time in the area, showing his support for the help desk. Or have the VP from the
supported business area come by and talk about how important the help desk is to the company's
success. Most people leave a little in the tank each day, but help desk crunch time is when
the staff needs to go home on empty. Showing how much you value your team will go a long way.
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