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Tips for Staffing a Help Desk (Help Desk, Part 4)

Paul Chin

11/13/2006

If you want a cat, get a cat. Don't buy an iguana and try to force it to meow.

It's not easy getting people to change their negative habits and instincts -- especially if they're unwilling, or unable, to do so. Potential help desk agents (HDAs) without basic customer service skills -- emotional intelligence, communication skills, patience, flexibility, and empathy -- are not always the best candidates to work in a front line service department even if they have strong technical abilities.

There's a wealth of technical ability on the job market, but when it comes to staffing a help desk, candidates must be equally adept at both the technical skills and customer relations. In much the same way that HDAs need to look beyond technology when dealing with users, help desk managers need to look beyond the technical qualifications on a resume when interviewing candidates.

Staffing a Help Desk

The success of a help desk must be measured by more than the number of completed service tickets. While that's the easiest to quantify, it's not the only factor at play. User satisfaction, although much harder to measure, deserves equal weight.

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HDAs could fix a technical problem but leave users perplexed, frustrated, or angered. Even though the technical problem was fixed, would you really consider this a successful interaction?

The best way to ensure a high level of user satisfaction is to hire the right people, with the right attitude and temperament, to work in the help desk. Users expect technical problems to be solved by HDAs as a matter of fact, but they will appreciate the conscientious and friendly manner in which they do it. This will help create a positive relationship between the help desk and the workers.

Sometimes it's better to hire a novice or intermediate IT person with outstanding people skills -- and then providing advanced technical training --than to hire an expert IT person with a surly disposition who can't be bothered to take the time to explain things to users. Teaching technical skills is much easier than "re-socializing" those who aren't naturally people people. Donna Earl, whom I interviewed in the first part of this series, put it best in her article Hire the Best for Your Help Desk: "Hire the behavior you want, train the skill."

Effects of An Ill-Staffed Help Desk

The performance -- in terms of technical problem resolution and customer service -- of a corporate help desk is directly related to how users perceive the help desk. An unsatisfied user-base will have negative opinions of the help desk if HDAs don't take time to interact with users in any meaningful way -- even if most problems are solved at the technical level.

Hiring the wrong people can end up ruining the reputation of the entire help desk. A single ill-tempered HDA will have a negative impact on the rest of the team. This will end up being a case of a minority undoing the hard-fought efforts of a majority.

Encounters with a difficult help desk possessing poor customer service skills may eventually cause users to become reluctant to report their problems, believing that it's better to live with the problem than to have to deal with the hassle of calling the desk. These problems can slow users down and result in lost productivity. This will lead to a decrease in the number of calls to the help desk, or worse, an angry mob protesting its ineffectiveness. Senior management -- those who write HDAs' paychecks -- might view the help desk as an unnecessary financial millstone and eventually decide to outsource the technical support operation entirely.

Tips for Interviewers

Hiring for a help desk is a fine art. While a resume will list candidates' ability to bend bytes and tinker with the nuts and bolts, it tells managers little about their ability to interact with users.

Managers need to get an impression of candidates' people skills by the way they speak and carry themselves in an interview -- which isn't always indicative of a candidate's true personality since most people put on their "game face" during interviews.

Here are a few things managers can do to protect the integrity of their help desk when hiring, and working with, new HDAs:

Give the initial interview over the phone. This will give managers a good sense of the candidates' phone mannerisms and etiquette. Phone skills are crucial since dealing with users over the phone is often more difficult than dealing with them in person. When an HDA is in the field, he or she can simple do what they need to do at the user's computer. When HDAs try to solve problems over the phone with users, they usually have to walk the user through the troubleshooting procedures -- something that requires a great deal of patience if users aren't tech-savvy.

Whenever possible, give precedence to tech-savvy people people who may need some additional technical training, rather than tech experts who require a lot of "re-socializing." Tech experts who are accustomed to working alone will do well in a behind-the-scenes role but aren't always suited for a front line service department.

Train, train, train. This is especially true for help desk candidates who have never worked in a front line customer service department before. Computer science graduates, for example, are used to hammering away at technical problems in darkened computer labs from morning to night, but how many of these students were ever taught to interact with users? Graduates should be given the opportunity to augment the technical skills they learned at school with real-life user interaction skills.

Become a "secret shopper." In the same manner that secret shoppers are used to test the quality and service of retailers, help desk managers should occasionally use "secret users" to test the performance and effectiveness of HDAs in a real world environment.

Managers should hire HDAs on a probationary basis (usually 1-3 months) before hiring them full-time.

Provide plenty of feedback and advice so HDAs can have an opportunity to improve.

Technical skills can be bought; the ability to interact with users in a human way can't. Hire the people with the right temperament for the job, and train for the rest. Help desk training must include both technical skills and customer service skills. It's vital that we shift the focus from technical support to user support. After all it's not technology we're supporting, it's the people using the technology.

Paul Chin (www.paulchinonline.com) is an IT consultant and a freelance writer. Previously, Paul worked as an intranet and content management specialist in the aerospace and competitive intelligence industries.

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