7 Back-to-Basics Approaches for Help Desk Operational Excellence

1 - Focus on First Contact Resolution(FCR)
The standard for excellence is for a Help Desk to solve 80% or more of it's total contact volume on the first contact with the customer. First Contact Resolution drives excellence in a support organization and must be the focus of every product and service the Help Desk supports. All continuous improvement projects based upon increasing customer satisfaction or improving efficiencies to lower cost should focus on delivering a higher level of FCR. The components of increasing FCR are Root Cause Analysis, High Impact Training, Leveraging an eSupport Strategy and Knowledge Management and Reporting. If you focus in on delivering a higher level of FCR, you will see a positive ripple effect through the rest of the end to end support process. If you practice Total Contact Ownership, where the Help Desk Professional who took the initial contact from the customer owns the resolution of the contact, then FCR makes practicing that philosophy much easier. The customer wants to have their contact resolved on first contact, the Help Desk wants to be in a position to resolve it on first contact and the second level teams really don't want to get involved if they don't have to. You figure it out! Give the Help Desk the tools, training, knowledge management and guidelines for resolving more contacts on first contact. You will be surprised at the results.

2 - Certification/Customer service skills
The standard for excellence for any support team is their ability to be customer-focused and meet or exceed customer expectations while fulfilling their fiduciary responsibility to the company's shareholders. The Help Desk Professional must be certified in all aspects of their role as it's relates to customer handling, problem management, screen human harmony, follow-up skills, analytical skills, communication and negotiating skills. If a company's products and services are a commodity, it is the level of service that a customer receives that is a differentiator in retaining customers for life. Technology is leveraged throughout the organization in supporting the customer and the business. Technology impacting the business and the employee's servicing the customer can no longer be afforded. There is always someone willing to help your customer if you cannot. Internal service quality will drive external service quality or in other words "Good treatment of workers results in similar treatment of customers."

3 - High Impact Training(HIT)
The call type measure derived from the Root Cause Analysis states that on average 80% of your call volume, or what people are calling about, can be linked to 20% of your call types. That is the premise that drives High Impact Training (HIT) and the logical approach for documenting the 20% or Top Ten call types that are being handled by your Help Desk team. The approach calls for a template that consistently documents the details of the call type from symptoms to root cause, from probing questions to what to focus on, from how to document the call to what the resolution is and how to resolve the problem over the phone on first contact. If you can focus in on your top ten problems, document and train your Help Desk professionals to resolve them using the one-page documentation as a guide, you will be on your way to improving your First Contact Resolution. This will have a ripple effect that will increase customer satisfaction, improve your cost per contact, and increase job satisfaction because your HDPs are resolving more problems then they are escalating. Need I get into the cost of escalation (e.g. $125 per event) or the inefficiencies it causes in the end to end support process!!!! What about the call backs and status calls!!!!! Somebody Help Me!

4 - Metrics and reporting
If you cannot measure it, how can you improve upon it! The standard for excellence in establishing a best-in-class Help Desk is its ability to measure its performance accurately and consistently. You cannot make the move to be a Strategic Help Desk if you cannot deliver tactically. You will not be able to deliver tactically if you do not know on a daily basis the "health of your support business". You will need a Morning Report to help you focus in on the areas that need your attention immediately. The Morning Report helps you practice exception management and will pinpoint where you need to focus your time and energy. You will need both team and professional metrics that focus on both the quantity aspect of their job as well as the quality aspect of their job. There is no getting around the importance of reporting and the role in plays in your success. Everything from FCR to Root Cause Analysis to being a feedback loop for your customers to the rest of the organization on what is not working depends on the quality of your action-driven reports. Don't leave your office without one, especially when the CFO and CIO want to talk to you about TCO and your Cost per Call so they can compare it to a proposal they received from an Outsourcer.

5 - Root cause analysis
This is the driver for increasing First Contact Resolution. This is also the driver for almost everything that you will do to improve the delivery of your service to the business. You will need to know why your customers are calling and what they are calling about before you can actually implement ways to better serve them. The value of Root Cause Analysis is that is gives us a target at which to aim a laser focus improvement project and measure the results in terms of impact to that targeted area. Root Cause Analysis is a methodology that depends on your ability to extract the call types from your call tracking/problem management system. It also depends very heavily on how you have established your call types, product codes or resolution codes and how your Help Desk Professionals code the calls as they enter, update and resolve. The hierarchy of your call types, the number of your product codes, the logic surrounding their creation, the training for logging calls by particular call types and the amount of monitoring and quality assurance are all factors in your ability to perform a quality Root Cause Analysis.

6 - Phone time
This is simple and will only take about 2-4 hours of your time a week. It is also important to delegate this task to the Team Leads and Supervisors. The Help Desk Manager or Director that takes the time to listen in on the phones with their tram will not only learn first hand why their customers are calling but also how they are being treated. It is also an excellent way to find out what new processes need to be created for call handling that has yet to be documented because we leave in a world of rapid change. As Chief Customer Advocate and Leader for the Help Desk, you owe it to yourself to take sometime and listen.....ssssshhhhhhhh!

7 - Assessment
The standard for excellence in being a best-in-class Help Desk is to know first where you are before determining where you want to go and how you want to get there! The assessment is critical to the operational performance and continuous improvement of the Help Desk service delivery model. All good assessments start with interviewing and then dive down deep into the operations and heath of Help Desk as it relates to Business Alignment, Business and Service Culture, Process Methodologies, Staffing and Education, Tools and Technology, Reporting and Documentation. The Assessment is the stake in the ground and will be the baseline measurement for how you communicate the impact of your Reengineering efforts towards World Class!

Resources

Latest events

No Events Currently Scheduled