Help Desks must have satisfied customers, or they will go be outsourced, downsized or changed. I've seen that happen time and again to many of my peers. So how do we satisfy customers, and how do we MEASURE customer service so we can make it better going forward, and lastly, what goal do we set for 2007?
The trick to satisfying customers on a Help Desk, and I use the word trick loosely, is to listen intently to what they really need, and then give them that. Notice I said need, not want. Often customers ask for something we can not provide, and if we took the question at face value, when we got asked many questions, the answer would be no. I hate to say no, and most people on Help Desks get no joy from saying no either. I'll talk about that another time.
So if the answer to what they want is no, how can the answer to what they need be yes? Easy: because with computers, the way may lead us to a no, but there are probably 10 other ways to do something, so focusing on a need allows us to say yes instead of no.
For instance, if someone asks "Can I have a CD burner installed on my PC?", instead of saying "No, you can't," and then hiding behind "That's our policy!"), our question becomes "Do you have a presentation you need burned to CD?" and we'll burn the presentation to CD for them and deliver the CD to them via inter-office mail, and the customer got what they need.
So how do we measure customer service? One good way to do it is via random survey. HDI has an excellent tool called the Customer Satisfaction Index or CSI, SurveyMonkey does surveys, sometimes the call tracking tool you have offers surveys, whatever tool you use to survey, this can work for you. Then, a metric is easy. If you're on a 4 point scale, you figure out where you are, figure out where you want to be, and away you go. Setting up a survey can be unique to each environment, or HDI CSI can be more generic.
The other way is informal phone calls from the Help Desk manager to the end users calling in, or to the managers and leaders of the business units to see how satisfied people are. This is tougher to measure, but I find people get used to talking to me and give me honest feedback about my team because I cared enough to call them. I set the metric on this for how many times do I need to re-open a ticket because of this phone call, or how many calls do I get back saying "This ticket isn't closed." My goal is less than 5 per month, and last year we did a fantastic job of this, averaging around 3 per month, with some months with only 0 or 1.
Remember: Happy employees equal happy customers, so I'll be sharing some thoughts on employee happiness soon here at Help Desk Notes.
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