Devoted to Help Desk and Technical Support personnel and applications

I have designed/published and helped publish two very different Help Desk Newsletters.  The first one I am going to discuss was very successful and it was cloned by a number of other help desks.  It was designed to help a fast growing help desk get and stay on the same page.  If you want to impress your upper management, come up with a newsletter that fits the needs of your help desk.  I received some criticism from a few of my peers along the way, but in the end they were on board with the idea.

When you have a fast growing help desk, or a help desk with heavy turn over, you have to find a way to keep everyone moving in the same direction.  It can be a bit like throwing a handful of marbles on the ground.  They all have different personalities and expertise.  If you are constantly pounding them with email updates, some people will read all emails diligently and others won’t.  While working on a growing help desk with a knowledge base that was still under construction,  I decided to start a Newsletter that highlighted all the new things we learned that week so that my techs could get all their information in one place regularly.  There were still plenty of times when I had to send out emails in between, but I re-wrote them in the newsletter to re-enforce the importance.  Here is the basic format I followed:

Section 1 – Updates, highlights, procedure changes

Section 2 – Over all Help Desk statistics  (# of calls, emails, etc.)

Section 3 – Fine tuning.  This is where I would state some of the obvious problem areas like “Remember that if you need to escalate a ticket to the (____) Team, include the user ID in your ticket.

Section 4 – Kudos for great work to a specific person.  It is important not to give this to the same person twice.  I tried to find one special skill or talent about everyone to highlight.

Section 5 – I put in a link to a tech cartoon on the internet.  Be careful not to copy graphics because of copyrights etc.
 

Watch for my future posts about Help Desk Newsletters including a sample newsletter, other topics, and how to have fun with the newsletter.

I also linked the picture above to a website that makes templates.  There are plenty of software programs that have ready made templates in case you lack the talent to create your own template - like I do! 

See Part 2 of the series Impress Your Boss! Write a Newsletter!