Some readers may be wondering, why in the world would you want to increase your help desk call volume? Don't you want to keep calls to a minimum? Doesn't fewer calls mean there are fewer problems? Well when you have 40,000 users worldwide, and you only receive 200 calls a day, you have a serious lack customer satisfaction. That was the scenario in one call center some years ago.
How was this problem resolved? How do you change the minds of 40,000 people? How do you make them realize that if they call the help desk, they will get the support they need? It was quite a project, and not something that could be solved over night, but within 3 years the call volume was raised to 2,000 calls per day. Through word of mouth and personsonal experience, customers learned that they could call and get the help they needed.
1. First the contract was turned over to a new company. Ah, here we are talking about outsourcing again! I have survived on both sides of the outsourcing dilemmia. This is the other side.
2. In house advertising: Every location was notified that they would be calling a new phone number for support. The phone number was changed to an 800 number. All sites were also given small stickers that could be put on their computers. The stickers had the name of the help desk and the new 800 number. 
3. Now for the important part. Help desk training began. Since the help desk was building a new team of people, it was easy to start fresh. It was challenging though, because that meant reinventing the wheel for this help desk. There was constant re-enforcing the importance of letting techs know that making the customer happy was critical. Going out of the way to solve a problem was a good thing.
4. Building the knowledge base became critical also. Several people were assigned full time to the task of putting everything we knew in one place.
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See these related posts:
Knowledge Base Tips
Help Desk Outsourcing
Help Desk Training Tips: The First Five Things Every Help Desk Tech Should Learn Before Taking Calls
Ah - it's wonderful to see continued touting of the importance of the knowledge base! The last organization I worked for failed to see the importance of a knowledge base, password reset tool or any other technology investments and they are paying dearly for the lack of foresight through increased turnover, training and contractor costs and decreased customer satisfaction. (Near 75% turnover in less than 3 months)
Posted by: John Alfonso | September 12, 2007 12:47 PM | Permalink to Comment