How does a clumsy help-desk look like for you?

I would like to know from those who are or have been in help-desk, what do you guys consider clumsy in how the help-desk system is managed and in your experience what have you encountered that is unacceptable in the management of the help-desk on a customer service point of view?

I would like to know what is your response time for all tickets logged in your help-desk and what happens when the response hasn't been met?

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Comments

bgold87

The one thing that helped us really clean up the help-desk was to bring all departments together and negotiate an SLA with our internal folks. Leverage whatever ticketing system you have to adhere to it.

markulous

SLA's and stats are so important. I've witnessed both and it takes much more micro managing to get the desk that doesn't have any SLAs or stats in good shape. People will find ways of slacking off if there's no consequence or anything tangible for them to follow.

aspiringsoul

Tickets are stored in an Excel spreadsheet?

markulous

aspiringsoul wrote: »

Tickets are stored in an Excel spreadsheet?

That would be pretty bad. Or tickets are actually written tickets. I'd walk out if I saw that.

SoCalGuy858

It's already been said, but for those larger companies that still think they can operate with a small business mentality:

No SLAs / tier system for help desk tickets. Tickets come in, and management loosely enforces "self-monitoring" of the queue. This leads to people either a) slacking off and ignoring the queue until something is assigned to them, or 2) diligently concentrating on their higher-level troubleshooting tasks, still ignoring the queue, and letting simple things like account lockouts slip through the cracks.

N2IT

Have a competent management staff who hires good people who have technical skills.

Process and Tool sets only go so far, it comes down to the quality of resources.

To the OP's point, unacceptable is hiring junk resources.

Kai123

Account Manager "Yes Men" promising the world to customers before it gets to Provisioning, and selling EFM everywhere. I have literally over 25 tabs open (minimum) but I'm so used to them now I know where everything is. Was a nightmare the first few months working here.

SLA's vary with customers. One customer charges us for every minute of downtime. They have radio links so this happens often, but it keeps a fire under the RF Ops team. Anything we assign as P3 needs a 12 hour update to the customer.

Manager will normally get the whip out if some tickets are over 7 days old, but they only require and update, normally "no update".