Is Help Desk my dream job?

Quench24

Currently have a lot of down time which I do not like. I am a Desktop Support Tech.

As a Help Desk tech I'd be constantly fielding calls/tickets right? Remote-ing into user's computers to resolve their issues?

Anyone have experience working as a Help Desk? Share your experiences please

Thanks,

Quench

PJ_Sneakers

I worked a really busy help desk. It was organized chaos, but I loved it for some reason.

Quench24

Can you share more? Like what were your duties?

PJ_Sneakers

Everything short of driving out and doing breakfix. Talked to a lot of mad people. Reset dozens of passwords every hour. Routed tickets to specialized teams. Lots of callbacks. Tons of documentation. And a whole lot of being polite to extremely rude people.

Quench24

Thanks.

xxxkaliboyxxx

Helpdesk worker here. I work for a specific DoD agency. Day in and day out I get blamed, yelled, rant, vent, and every once in a while I get the very nice customer. For whatever reason, our small little helpdesk is the fault of anything IT or even electronic related. New DoD approved iPhone isn't easy to setup their work email, our fault. VPN server went down because network guys doing maintenance, our fault. Got locked out because they input the wrong pin 3 times, our fault. Microwave won't heat up hotpocket fast enough, our fault.
Just be ready to receive the blunt of the blame for everything, you are the first line they call even before they do their own troubleshooting steps like reboot. With that said, having a good postive attitude and realizing and ensuring the customer you are there to help and not just dispatch their problem will calm even the worst of customers.
I touch on lots of techology to include citrix, bomgar, AD, NetApp, Cisco CM, BES servers, XenMobile, SCCM, ETC.
You can work on your presentation and communication skills, people will eventually recognize your hardwork because a helpdesk is high visibility for management (might take a little time, but if you just keep the quality up, you'llame be fine).
Also depending on your shift, you could have time to study either school work or certs.

Quench24

xxxkaliboyxxx wrote: »

Helpdesk worker here. I work for a specific DoD agency. Day in and day out I get blamed, yelled, rant, vent, and every once in a while I get the very nice customek or certs.

Hey.

So.. do you sit at a desk? Or a cubicle next to co workers? Is it loud? Hard to focus?

Do you get calls after calls after calls? Or is there down time inbetween? How long?

Thanks.

xxxkaliboyxxx

Quench24 wrote: »

Hey. So.. do you sit at a desk? Or a cubicle next to co workers? Is it loud? Hard to focus? Do you get calls after calls after calls? Or is there down time inbetween? How long? Thanks.

Really depends on the size of your organization. Who are you going to be working for? In my case, DoD right now we have no time inbetween calls.

When I first started I would get about 2-5 minutes in between calls. After normal work hours, things slow down a lot. Helpdesk stay open 24 hours since we service people worldwide. There are various helpdesk, but most use cubicles and its not very hard to speak to your customer if that's what you mean.

With that said, it depends on your organization's layout. Is it more like a ATT/DELL call center? Where are you looking to be a helpdesk analyst at? I've seen 2 man helpdesk, HELL I ran a 1 man helpdesk in a remote location during my time in the Army.

EDIT: just notice you got another post going. You should condense your post.

PJ_Sneakers

Quench24 wrote: »

Hey.

So.. do you sit at a desk? Or a cubicle next to co workers? Is it loud? Hard to focus?

Do you get calls after calls after calls? Or is there down time inbetween? How long?

Thanks.

Down time? Hell if you aren't answering the phone your ass better be dead, calling people back, or responding to tickets.

Quench24

xxxkaliboyxxx wrote: »

Really depends onour organization's layout. Is it more like a ATT/DELL call center? Where you looking to be a helpdesk at, I seen 2 man helpdesk, HELL I ran a 1 man helpdesk in a remote location in the Army.

I don't know. I'm just looking around to see if I can find a part time. Probably like ATT/DELL call center.

xxxkaliboyxxx

Quench24 wrote: »

I don't know. I'm just looking around to see if I can find a part time. Probably like ATT/DELL call center.

expect no downtime unless you work 3rd shift

EagerDinosaur

I'm primarily a developer but do some 3rd line support.

I don't mind supporting products where I have the opportunity to investigate and fix the underlying problems that are causing tickets to be raised, and so reduce the number of tickets being raised in future. What I don't like is having to support ancient flaky legacy systems with loads of known issues and no prospect of improving them in any way.

PJ_Sneakers

EagerDinosaur wrote: »

What I don't like is having to support ancient flaky legacy systems with loads of known issues and no prospect of improving them in any way.

Help desk all day long bro. Ain't the help desk's job to fix a damn thing except a caller's Word settings or PowerPoint animation.

cyberguypr

OP, be cognizant that titles do not mean anything. Some places call break/fix technicians "Help Desk". In more formalized operations Help Desk is exclusively a tier 1 job consisting of answering the phone and guiding people through relatively simple things. So again, don't focus on any one title, but on the duties of the role. I did Desktop Support for years and enjoyed it but would've killed myself if I had to do 100% tier 1 phone support with no hands-on.