Although I have often thought about it, I just realized that I never written about the birth of a Help Desk Operations Center. If you compare a help desk to a hospital, the Help Desk Operations Center is the Emergency Room.
The idea of a Help Desk Operations Center was born when a group of frustrated, new help desk technicians lost their minds in a sea ringing phones. (aka: a call center) Like a child learning to swim, these brave souls were thrown on phones with little or no training. It was a story of survival for those who could figure out what to do the fastest. Some people foundered, and those who did not became the trainers for new people coming on board. One of the biggest problems stemmed from the lack of subject matter experts to answer questions. Some people played Russian Rolette with their tickets, others took the time to make phone calls, and verify that they were sending a ticket to the appropriate group. It was not just a zoo, IT WAS A FREAKING CIRCUS!
Since I was one of the lucky people taking calls back then, I started making suggestions to the management at the time. After demonstrating the amount of time techs wasted getting answers, and evaluating the number of tickets inappropriately handled, upper management began to see why we needed someone around to answer questions at all times. You never want to bombard someone with too many suggestions at once, but instead, give one suggestion at a time that can help a number of different problems. In addition, I also submitted more written procedures than anyone on the help desk. A position in the Operations Center was a natural step for me. The Operations Center became a permanent fixture. Someone was always available to assist techs on the large help desk. This refocus of the help desk allowed us to detect, escalate, and resolve outage and issues quickly.
And that is how it began. Got a question? Post it? Got ideas? Share them!
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