Some help desk managers have only one criteria in mind when hiring new help desk agents and that is; the candidate needs to be technically savvy. If the candidate responds to a few technical questions correctly, he has a good chance of getting hired. This is wrong, the process should take into account many other factors that contribute to a good help desk system. In fact, being technically is only half of the help desk process
To create a successful help desk system, managers need to take into account a crucial help help desk component when hiring new help desk agent often non-existent on many help desk personnel, and that is a basic social and interpersonal skills required to interact with users in a meaningful and productive way. This shortcoming often lies in the fact that many help desk employees often concentrate solely on the technical problem and ignore the person having the issue. A good help desk employee guides a user through a problem in a human fashion, not acting as a technical manual or automated machine, but as human who understands not only the technical problem but also the person needing the help.
Help desk must involve more than technical solutions, even though this is the ultimate goal, but by the way it is achieved is what make a difference between a good help desk employee and a mediocre one. The good help desk guy earns the approval and trust of users, while the mediocre one gets avoid at all cost.
Ram is a young help desk professional from India, who is an exceptional help desk agent, loved and respected by all his users. And Ram is not the most technical savvy person on earth, but he possesses those interpersonal skills that make people trust. Ram understands what is important to users and he acts accordingly. He is often seen walking on hallways walking with his laptop on his hand going to help a user having a printer problem, while chatting with someone in Ghana wanting to connect to the network through terminal server. Ram is a celebrity.
The mentality ” I get paid to solve problems, not to be nice” does not get very far. Soon users will ignore the person with this mentality, and go with the help desk agent that listen and understand their problems. This often happens on field services, or small companies where users have direct communication with help desk personnel.
last but not least, managers should measure help desk success not by how many tickets the help desk agent successfully completes in a period of time, but also by users satisfaction. even though 100 % satisfaction cannot be reached among users, but polling the users once in a while should yield an idea what is the level of satisfaction among users in the organization.
What do you think? Do you think being technical is all there is to be a good help desk agent?
absolutely not. to be a good helpdesk agent, the warm attitude is the mostly heavy weapon.
serve the users in mind ,spirite,heart….
i’m a helpdesk too, and love your DOC very very much.
thank you for posting so many excellent articles.