Help Desk Issues - Assignment Example

Help Desk Issues Name Professor Tutor Date People Issues 1. Discuss the four main ‘people’ issues that Sarah had to deal with. Make reference to negative aspects for employees working on Help Desks or in Call Centres (include the concept of ‘churnover’). Employee problems resurface in companies and more so helpdesk. These problems are more specific and obvious in most organizations. These problems result from attendance issues, poor service delivery and failure to deliver results. Some problems in the workplace may not have the immediate causes detected. When problems are worrisome and undesired, the supervisor or person in charge should act swiftly to stave a major loss. The article dwells on specific employee problems, and the remedies. The major problem Sarah faced was addressing the boss with ill fit managerial skills. The boss may have been promoted due to job related-skill and not the people management skills. The boss did not know what he wanted but just to have easy time with his staff. Some company employees are promoted to supervisory level due to their problem solving and technical solving problems. Sarah would have the boss and other employees get better training on their respective goals. Some of the managers do not make managing people problem a priority. The company rewarded the boss for the bottom line results got rather than his people management skills (Czegel, 1998, 120). Thus, the boss had little incentive to focus on what really mattered to his employees. The boss increased span of control blindfolded him to get to know his employees and address the individual employee problems. He was also managing a larger number of employees than before which proved difficult. There are the employees who have perfected the disappearing act. Ron could cite various ‘illness’ or excuses for his chronic absenteeism pattern. Fauerbach (1999), attests that the problem crops up due to their personal problems. Ron was a hypochondriac who was legendary absentee. The said employee is given some off to cool off and once he is back, he is given a kick-start strategy. This spotty attendance is arranged of work dissatisfaction or home problem. Talk to the employee privately as Sarah did to find of the cause of the problem. Afterwards offer the employee an assistance programme or enlist EAP provider to create such problem with your employee. If the problem is dissatisfaction then consider raising a workplace to enhance improvement. Then there is the sour-apple employee who bad-mouths the organization and leadership to other people. If this person is not addressed, it may lead a mass exodus of employees or customers. If Susan and Mick are not corrected, could become the sour apples in the help-desk organization. Mick’s resentment toward Sarah for ‘stealing’ his job would calumniate in badmouthing Sarah to other employees. This would spiral to poisoning other employees against her. Susan’s attitude off saying she was not present fully in the organization poisoned other employees. Sarah hence needed to address the underlying issues the two employees had. Sarah should watch out and avoid telling them her personal comments such as ‘you are irresponsible’ or ‘you are lazy’. Instead, she adhered to work ethics policy to address each of them individually. These discontented employees take a toll in company causing losses (Czegel, 1998, p.90). Excessive grousing employee should be halted. The call centre organization lacked a role model. The employees, Jane, Ron, Sam, Tim and Jean lacked where to go to when they had work related issues thus they did nothing to address the issue. In fact, Sam went ahead to design his job on his own. This slowly grew into a big issue that led them to be unmotivated with two-employed ending up overworked and disorganised. Just like that, the boss ended up being promoted without the needed people-managerial skills. Sara took the initiative to motive them individually thus, spurring the churnover effect at the workplace. Churnover effect is the high rate of providing functional outputs from dubious quality in a quality and methodological manner. Churnover concept is evidenced in the way Sarah turned the poorly working employees into more productive and enthusiastic team in a span of three weeks. Most of these employees lacked training in their fields. Susan did not outline any formal training she had undergone when asked by Sarah. In most organisations, budgetary allocations made for handling employee issues, and employee communications are cut or removed. The employees and manager are not given necessary training to manage their work effectively. There is the poor-fit employee who was hired as the ultimate winner only to find that their customer-service skills are not polished. These employees use unprofessional words such as ‘cool, awesome, like’ when interacting with clients even after getting formal training on things that cause poor impression on customers (O’Connor et al, 2001). Helpdesk requires sophisticated skills to be used in every customer interactions. This trait in employees is always difficult to detect in the few moments of an interview. The helpdesk can create a probation period to determine if one can hire them permanently, set internship policy to review employees before hitting them. The helpdesk employees should give their expectations clear through performance reviews and written policies. Then there is current a craze in organizations to create leaderless teams may have led to deteriorating of work. The desk team were abandoning to make decisions on their own and handed more responsibilities to help solve people issues. Thus, no one in the team is to solve people issues. Lastly, the diminishing number of human resource capacity was a major problem. The organizations may have drastically cut the human resource staff. In fact, there was none hence Sarah was employed as the sole staff to do so. Jean and Tim were underworked because of understaffing. Other organizations have outsourced or got computerised HR functions. Future Actions 2. Explain three important actions that Sarah should take in future to make sure the team continues to work well and the Help Desk functions effectively. Sarah should create a circle of success through setting employee expectations, metrics, assessment and improving of services. A survey conducted by Foreester research, 41 %of 2000 help desk agents was undecided of their satisfaction. They stated the areas that needed improvement like; timeline status, expertise and time used to resolve conflicts. In managing expectations, Sarah should put into the consideration of internal and external customer demands. She should have a system in place to manage and track times used to resolve each incident. With this information available, the agents can quick access and rely to customers based on historical evidence other than guesses. Ask the users through informal surveys to kick-start improvement process. To search for satisfaction, Sarah should seek a method to identify problems critical to desk success. She can install a periodic audit program. She then has to establish metrics to measure success to provide assessment of helpdesk performance and monitor improvement (Zendesk, 2012,p.122). Second methodology she should employ is to follow proven leaders. She should assess her organizations performance against best praises of industry players. Whether they compare favourable or fall short of industry standards. She will use the results measure her annual progress. Thirdly, she should try reducing and simplifying improvement of projects. Middleton (1996) theorises that during the planning process she can use off-the-shelf software that models best practises, functionality and Return on Inventory. The proven software saves her the pain, time and cost of reinventing the wheel. Depending on the complexity of the process, she can use a systems integrator. The integrator interacts with CRM system business process and call centre technologies. Qualities 3. Discuss the qualities of an effective Customer Service or Help Desk or Call Centre team member. Every helpdesk member should demonstrate reliability by getting their work done early whilst meeting their commitments. Ron should follow his assignments effectively and consistently. The members should show commitment to the team, and to their work. Employees like Ron, Mick and Susan should show improved commitment to their work always. Each of them need do communicate constructively the others. The likes of Susan should speak up freely directly and honestly with respect to the others (Ritchie, 2012, p.145). They should not shy to make points instead they should express it positively, confident and respectful manner. Each on the members should listen actively to the customers and each other. Good listeners, understand and put into consideration the ideas and points of view without putting up arguments every time. Importantly communications and problem solving situations require discipline to listen and talk. Team members should be active participants at the service desk operations. They should go to meetings prepared to contribute to discussions and engage filly in teamwork. These people should take initiative for things to happen. Members willing to share knowledge information and experience, take the initiative to inform others. Ritchie (2012) asserts that in informal settings, the members should be free to talk to each other, pass news and information. They can make use of Sarah who is very open. The helpdesk members should be cooperative and pitch to help others. Effective members work this way by second virtue. Despite differences, these team members should find ways of to solve problems and get work done in good style and perspective. Helpdesk always faces changes and various incidents. They sometimes encounter the most dreaded calls hence need to design new tactics to deal with every changing situations. Hence, members should be flexible; roll with every punch and adapt to the changing situations. They should not complain or are stressed because a new idea is being implemented or new directions are being followed (O’Connor, 2001, p.130). They should be opening minded to consider different directions and should compromise when needed. They should not be rigid and always argue. Team members should be tolerant. For instance, Mick should forgive Sarah for thinking that she stole his job. Such employees should initiate conversation and apologise for being wrong. The members should be creative and work smart. These employees should be clear of their responsibilities and not take it as a burden. They should do something out of the box. They should be focused and concentrate on their work to avoid interfering with others. They should be patient to work with the rest and not over react to small issues. Lastly, the team member should treat others with respect and be supportive. They should be understanding and offer appropriate support to other team members in doing a job. Metrics 4. Describe the metrics Sarah can use to analyse Help Desk operations – include both quantitative and qualitative metrics. Sarah should evaluate the performance data in her organizations first before diving into the performance metrics details. These performance data include the input data, output data, status data, customer- satisfaction survey data, major incidents data and timeliness of resolutions and reposed data (Zendesk, 2012). Input data is collected from incidents logged. This should be expressed in some chart or graph and possibly give comments on the trend. The output data considers resolved incidents and backlog of unresolved incidents. This provides a comparison to the input data. The status data encompasses the number of active incidents at a daily basis. Customer satisfaction data is obtained because of obtaining trends of comments as to whether customer perceptions. Major incidents data is given as a summary of relevant major incidents that happened in the recent past. Finally, the timeliness of the response of the data is only obtained if the organizations are involved in service level management. This data show the performance in comparisons with the targets set. Several metrics indicate the measure of performance of the help desk indicated below. Sarah needs to evaluate customer satisfaction data since it is the key to the business existence. This is in a bid to know the customer perception on a daily basis. Call monitoring results will help her know the quality of customer experience and compliance with expected practises. The input data is used to measure the value of service articles to service desk, Sarah has to account for incidents resolved using the knowledge base by service desk. While the output data, helps Sarah to find the financial value per parameter the team must the inventory of handling each incident (Ritchie, 2012, p.130). Status data helps Sarah’s group categorise most commons incidents. Thus, the helpdesk management will be able to identify suitable candidates for problem management. Status data find out the number of service level breaches. Therefore, Sarah’s team will be able to measure weaknesses and strengths of helpdesk services and supporting services. Then the average time used to resolve major incidents using the priory and category, indicates staffing level, identifying train opportunities and skills issues. Metric of incidence spawned by change indicate the weaknesses in Sarah’s management change (Ritchie, 2012, p.120). Finally, the timeliness of resolutions and response data helps identify the number of issues resolved without the helpdesk support indicates customer bypassing the service desk to ask for incident resolution. Additionally, to measure the telephony performance, Sarah will need to perform the inventory of the following. According to Bruton(1997, p.129), the Average answering speed metrics indicates the staff availability to meet service agreements. The number of inbound calls by an analyst to know the demand for service staff to answer calls and the average outbound talk time by service Desk agent will indicate the activity distribution of the service agent’s .These trends can be particularly informative (Bruton, 1997, p.120). The number of income and outgoing calls by an analyst serves to indicate callers bypassing ACD to reach their favourite desk agent, waiting times and abandoning rates. References Bruton, N1997, How to Manage the IT. Help Desk.: Butterworth-Heinemann, Woburn, MA. Choi, J., Hecht, G. W., Tayler, W. B 2013, Strategy Selection, Surrogation, and Strategic Performance Measurement Systems. Journal of Accounting Research. Vol. 51 (1), p105-133. 29p. Czegel, B 1998, Running an Effective Help Desk, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York. Ken, F1999, “High-Volume Call Centers at NYU,” Connect: . NYU: Information Technology at NYU 10. Marler, J., H 2012, Strategic Human Resource Management in Context: A Historical and Global Perspective. Academy of Management Perspectives, Vol. 26 (2), p6-11. 6p. O’Connor, N., B., Bronner, M., & Delaney, C 2001, Training for Organizations, 2d ed, South-Western Educational Publishing Compant, Cincinnati. Ritchie, G 2012, Service/Desk helpdesk performance metrics and reporting. Retrieved May 22, 2013, from Serio. Com: http://www.seriosoft.com/white_papers/serio_service_desk_metrics.pdf Zendesk, T 2012, Creating Service Desk Metrics. Retrieved May 22, 2013, from Zendesk.com: http://cdn.zendesk.com/resources/whitepapers/Zendesk_WP_PinkElephant.pdf Read More