Devoted to Help Desk and Technical Support personnel and applications

In Mike McBride: part 1, Mike shared who he was and what his favorite part of the Help Desk is, important things in getting to know a bit more about what makes Mike tick. When I read Mike's answers, I felt like I got some great insights.

Now, we'll dive a bit deeper into Mike McBride's Help Desk, and what makes it successful.

Phil: What is your key metric for success on your Help Desk? Mike: That's an interesting question. Actually, measuring the work of help desk folks has been a recent topic of discussion on my blog because I'm not sure how you do it, really. I've never been a fan of using the number of tickets closed as a metric because it's too easy to rig that.

On the other hand, you have to use something as a manager to measure, and I don't know what that is. Since I'm not in management, I can come up with my own subjective "metric", and how I measure myself is by the number of issues that are unresolved. My feeling is that 90-95% of the contacts I get from people (calls or emails), I should either be able to resolve for them or identify the person who can resolve them and get that person the proper information to do it, and the other 5-10% I should be able to explain why there isn't anything we can do to resolve their problem. (i.e. when someone can't get to a website because the site is down, or can't get an email to a client because their mail server is down, I can't resolve it, or put them in touch with someone who can, all I can do is explain it and ask them to be patient.)

To me, any time I'm unable to do any of those things with an issue, it's unresolved, and I've failed to provide support. Obviously, you'll always have an issue or two like that come up, but if it starts to happen frequently, then I need to examine why, and figure out what skill or knowledge I'm missing that could resolve them.

Phil: Interesting answer Mike. I've never thought about measuring the way you mentioned. We'll have to talk more about that sometime. Managers: Is this a valid metric? Do you have better ones? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think.

Phil: Tell me a bit about your Help Desk. How large is your Help Desk (agents and customers)? What are your hours? What is your most popular call, besides password resets?

Mike: As I said, it's a mid-sized law firm, about 350 users, spread across our main office and two small satellite offices, each about 2 hours away. All of our IT staff is based in Columbus , including the Help Desk. Help Desk support is available 7:30AM-6PM Mon-Fri. There are two full time Help Desk Specialists and our Help Desk Manager will cover the help desk at various times when he is not occupied with his other title, Training Coordinator. We stagger our work schedules so that there is always someone manning the help desk during those hours, I work the late shift, 9-6. Off hours, emergency-only support is handled by either our help desk manager or, if it's a network/server failure, one of our networking guys. They are all salaried, the two help desk specialists are hourly employees, so we are the last person any one wants to call. It costs too much. :)

Our most popular calls, I would imagine, are similar to any law firm's most popular calls. Helping a user sort out the document management system. They are huge and powerful, yet very complicated, systems. They take a lot of getting used to, and there are any number of things that can cause confusion from folder locations, to searching for documents, to folder/document security settings. It's not easy to keep track of everything, believe me I know this as well as anyone, we rolled out our new document management system and made it available to users my very first day on the job. For the first couple of weeks, the users had more training than I did on it. I had to get up to speed very, very quickly and I did that by tracking down answers to questions everyone else had.

Phil: This was very helpful at finding out a bit more about your desk Mike. We'll be posting more of our interview tomorrow and throughout the week. We're getting to the good parts now!