A logical IT Help Desk structure is important to ensure your company’s users know what support is available and how to contact IT Help Desk support. The ideal state is what we call a Single Point of Contact (SPOC) IT Help Desk structure. The SPOC IT Help Desk provides help and support for any issue verses just logging a call and escalating it. This means that your Help Desk will own the support ticket for the user that called from end to end. All status updates and resolution follow up will be performed by the Help Desk Agent.

Does your Help Desk structure need help?

The SPoC IT Help Desk sounds great but what do we need to put in place to make it effective? Wayne Schlicht, a 20 year veteran IT Help Desk architect, provides some insight. Wayne states, “to make a SPoC Help Desk effective we need the following”;

1. A single number that is readily available for the users to call for questions and support. This is important. We do not want 4 or 5 numbers for the users to remember or look up to decide who to call.

2. A Knowledge Base with every type of issue identified and a solution or an escalation point available. This will ensure a uniform service of consistent quality. If the user calls, our IT Help Desk needs to be able to solve it or know where to send the ticket.

3. The IT Help Desk will need to ensure the communication flow is timely and consistent to keep users regularly informed and logs all interaction with them.

4. Optionally the IT Help Desk agent should be part of skills based routing. Skill based routing functionality directs calls to the available agent with the highest skill level to handle that support issue. With skills based routing the First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate is much higher and will reduce the need to escalate to second level support.

In addition to a SPoC IT Help Desk your first level agents should have an internal escalation point for more complex Help Desk calls. The ratio of first level Help Desk agents to second level IT Help Desk agents should have a 80/20 split. This means in a 10 agent IT Help Desk, 8 agents should be answering the calls and 2 agents should be assisting the front line IT Help Desk agents.

Help Desk Mission and Vision statements

Does your company have Help Desk Mission and Vision statements that incorporates the corporate business goals and objectives? Help Desk Mission and Vision statements will clearly and precisely be focused on what your business is all about and related to the technology support your Help Desk team provides. A well-defined vision statement will provide a guide for clear and directional decisions to lead to long-term prosperity. The IT Help Desk Mission Statement will bring strategic focus of underlining goals and objectives of your Help Desk based on company values.

Starting with the Vision statement, we want to state what the owner or executive committee ultimately envisions the business to be.  A good Vision statement will allow you to create effective strategies for managing the company toward that vision. Here at Build a Help Desk, our Vision statement is simply;

“To continue to be recognized nationally as the leading professional resource site for industry standard for IT Help Desk procedures”.

The mission statement should be written from the customer’s perspective, be very specific, and it should fit with the vision for the business. The mission should answer three questions:

What do we do?
How do we do it?
For whom do we do it?

Build a Help Desk’s mission statement is;

“We provide validated industry standard knowledge by translating it into real life examples for Help Desk management world-wide.”

Once an IT Help Desk Mission and Vision statement has been defined for your Help Desk, your agents should be conveying it to the users they support. If you have a newsletter published by the Information Technology department or the Help Desk, the mission and vision statements should be front and center. All IT Help Desk training documentation and new hire material should have the mission and vision statements incorporated into them. Any