Devoted to Help Desk and Technical Support personnel and applications

The NFL pre-season games begin this week, so I thought the most appropriate topic would be Help Desk Support Training.

I felt the pain of being on a start up help desk once that lacked a training program.  In the beginning management had no choice but to throw techs on phones the day they started.  Technicians walking in the door were taking calls after a 20-minute overview. I was one of these lucky guinea pigs.  ;-)

We were given one 25 page contact list as our only resource.  The knowledge base did not exist.  There were a few designated people to go to who had only had six weeks more experience than I did.  It was chaotic to say the least.  I think that things would have gone smoother if we had been provided documentation that covered the most important areas of our job. 

Generally speaking, every help desk professional should know the following before they start tackling...I mean taking...calls on your help desk:

1.    Who to go notify if you suspect an outage, and which systems are the most critical for business operations.
2.    Create a ticket for every call.  Some calls require more than one ticket when the call covers more than issue.
3.    What types of calls are the most common, and how to solve them.
4.    Who to go to when you have questions.  
5.    If you learn something or encounter something that is not documented, take notes, record the ticket number you were working on, and do your best take care of the callers needs.