Desktop Support making a comeback?

I noticed the company I am working for is ramping up additional desktop support folks. Which is interesting, a close friend of mine who works for another fortune 500, said he noticed his company doing the same.

Could be pure coincidence, but I find it interesting that both companies are pushing more desktop support. I heard through the grapevine that my company has heard a lot of complaints from the helpdesk so they are going with more of a dedicated IT service model. I think it's WAY BETTER than a centralized help desk. You get to know the people and they come and help quickly

My friend mentioned his company has a walk up window where you can get immediate help, said it's great.

I honestly love the desk side model. You can just create a ticket and then walk down and boom. Love it.

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UnixGuy

Our company has the same walk up service..you might be right

TheFORCE

Those are just temporary solutions put in place by people who have no vision and spend the budget money for the sake of spending money. The future is VDI, put that budget amd resources towards VDI.

Dojiscalper

These things move in cycles. There's been a long move towards centralized help desks with remote support capability. I myself have been in helpdesk and desk side support. I've been in field service for most of my career and I've watched the quality of support erode over a long time. Especially when the support desk can barely speak the local language. I work with some fortune 500 companies now who have these support centers off shore and most of the time I spend a lot of time just on the language barrier.

Then there's many times, I'm just the "smart hands" on the site and I have to sit at some desk watching a remote tech fumble through settings. I'm not the type to take over and it actually pays me much more to let them waste my time. Its very inefficient and expensive for the end users company. Its a great model for all the vendors involved. I'm all the way down at the ground and I'm getting paid a lot per hour and I know from experience that everyone up the chain "sometimes 3-4 different companies involved in support" are all charging for "my time" and charging much more than I'm getting paid. Its almost as bad as what insurance companies do in medicine.

stark4

maybe i know which fortune 500 companies are hiring desktop support ?

TechGromit

Last year in a cost cutting move, my company (yes a fortune 500 company) cut the IT helpdesk call center staff in half. It was a wonderful idea, they were able to reduce staffing costs, saving the company a bunch of money. The end result was call hold times increased from just a few minutes to 30 to 60 minutes, sometimes longer. So they eliminated a bunch of jobs paying 40 to 50k, and had people making 80k to 100k+ waiting on the phone for help not doing any work. They realized the error of there ways hired more call center staff to reduce the wait times. It took them several months to train these new people, so the problem wasn't solved immediately. I think they learned there lesson, not all cut cutting plans yield positive results.

Hiring additional Desk Side support may be managements realization that if they have there highly paid engineers waiting around all day for computer help, it's more cost effective in the long run to hire additional IT support to minimize employees wait time for assistance.

Queue

Desktop support will continue to be a position in IT for the foreseeable future.

Even with VDI there will still be bad keyboards, patch cables, unplugged devices, mice, etc.

The printers still need maintenance kits, troubleshooting, etc.

As far as the company removing positions that was a business mistake. Seems they didn't do any statistics, you can use call manager/whatever you use and produce statistics as to what the call volume was.

The company I'm with could slash support desk calls in half by allowing users to access a portal to reset their own passwords. They would need to AD integrate all of our systems so there isn't one offs that require a password reset just for that application.

networker050184

My company has the walk up support bar model. I think people like being able to stop in and have their problems looked at real quick rather than opening a ticket and waiting for a call that might or might not come in a timely fashion.

TechGromit

Queue wrote: »

As far as the company removing positions that was a business mistake. Seems they didn't do any statistics, you can use call manager/whatever you use and produce statistics as to what the call volume was.

I agree, if they really wanted to reduce staffing, what the should have done was remove 1 or 2 positions and see how the call wait times were affected before for a few months before removing 1 or 2 more positions, this way you would get a sweet spot of reduced staff and minimal impact on call wait times. Slashing the department in half was a bone head move.

Basic85

The last place I worked at was centralized helpdesk, which meant calls coming from all over the country! It was a nightmare and headache because users were frustrated that they couldn't contact there local techs directly but instead through a ticket. So I like the idea of a more decentralized helpdesk and have it done locally.

beads

Here we have 4 in-house people for 275 employees. Help desk is famous for watching cat videos all day. Four windows administrators. One network engineer and one security person. I think I know two of these peeps feel overworked with overtime.

Back to mining that salt with the network guy.

- b/eads

yoba222

Dojiscalper wrote: »

These things move in cycles. There's been a long move towards centralized help desks with remote support capability. I myself have been in helpdesk and desk side support. I've been in field service for most of my career and I've watched the quality of support erode over a long time. Especially when the support desk can barely speak the local language. I work with some fortune 500 companies now who have these support centers off shore and most of the time I spend a lot of time just on the language barrier. . .

I was under the impression that there was considerable backlash because people hated the language barriers that came with out sourcing call centers to mostly India and that large companies went back to US-based call centers. I don't work with large company desktop support models so maybe my impression is not accurate.

Dojiscalper

yoba222 wrote: »

I was under the impression that there was considerable backlash because people hated the language barriers that came with out sourcing call centers to mostly India and that large companies went back to US-based call centers. I don't work with large company desktop support models so maybe my impression is not accurate.

I'm sure there's some of that as well. I deal with a lot of tech support centers in my work. The big complaint I get from my end users is the delay time between the time they place the call for an issue to when I show up. I can be the 3rd or 4th company involved at times so a week of delay is pretty normal by the time all the companies get the ticket routed down to me.

ThePawofRizzo

Unfortunately, I've seen that many users prefer some deskside service. That interface of simply being on the phone and having someone remote into their computer isn't comfortable for people that don't work in IT, and in some instances really a deskside visit is necessary. For example, it can be tricky understanding that someone is having a network or printer cabling issue if the user is super-stressed and scared to trace out a cable for someone on the phone - a desk side visit usually seems to put them more at ease. In my desktop career I spoke with many users who preferred my desk visits over dealing with the central helpdesk techs on the phone.

I do agree that VDI can help from a support perspective. And I think techs in desktop and mobile support probably should do all they can to start learning those types of skills, and get familiar with virtualization.

DatabaseHead

ThePawofRizzo wrote: »

Unfortunately, I've seen that many users prefer some deskside service. That interface of simply being on the phone and having someone remote into their computer isn't comfortable for people that don't work in IT, and in some instances really a deskside visit is necessary. For example, it can be tricky understanding that someone is having a network or printer cabling issue if the user is super-stressed and scared to trace out a cable for someone on the phone - a desk side visit usually seems to put them more at ease. In my desktop career I spoke with many users who preferred my desk visits over dealing with the central helpdesk techs on the phone.

I do agree that VDI can help from a support perspective. And I think techs in desktop and mobile support probably should do all they can to start learning those types of skills, and get familiar with virtualization.

Great point and I agree.... Over the weekend I met a younger guy who was certing in those technologies you mentioned. I really didn't have much to provided in regards to his career track, but did mentioned this board for QA if he was stuck.....

I agree I like the desk side model myself. Things get done so much quicker and more accurately.

Dojiscalper

I thought I'd update this on an experience I had yesterday. I was acting as smart hands so I was instructed to call into the clients helpdesk to get instructions to troubleshoot a failed secondary internet connection. It was a cellular modem connected to a router and then into the rest of the network and wasn't working and helpdesk remote support couldn't see the devices. Ok simple enough, but at this client they have everything labeled and documented to make things easier for the remote techs to provide end user instruction and support for techs. The support center is in India so the language barrier can be very difficult. I've had great techs do a really great job of helping me and even had some good laughs when you get someone who knows how us americans communicate, especially us hillbillies "yeah I grew up in Appalachia". This time though was totally different and I was left not sure what happened. The lady on the other end was very dry, zero small talk or anything other than exactly what we had to do. It was kinda odd that if I said anything except "yes, no, it didn't work, etc" she only had me repeat what I said. I think I may have been talking to a computer. If not than this person kept to the script perfectly. If I was talking to a computer it worked great though had I known it was a computer I would have treated it as such. No point in trying to get her number