Tech Wiz more on living on a helpdesk…

The hardest thing I ever had to do on a helpdesk was not able to help the person on the line. It makes you feel bad. Many years ago I was asked to provide telephone support for a moving company. It was the truck rental part of the moving company, and they were rolling out a new reservation and billing application. It, this new application, was also mandated. Before this application and the online connection to the central system, everything this company did was on paper only. You, as a rental truck owner, would fill everything out on paper and send that to the main office. They would then compile everything and send it back out to the owners. They were often 30, 60 and even 90 days behind the overall customer need.

Gary wrote a great helpdesk article a few months ago, a link to Gary’s post.

It was the goal of this application to cut 89 days out of that lag. They did eventually, but at first, it was extremely painful. In many cases, they were using dial-up connections. In many cases, they were providing computers to people that had never used a computer. I spend 2,3 and sometimes 4 hours walking a person through how to turn on the computer, how to connect the modem and how to use the application. Every single person that called had a unique configuration unless they had been provided a computer by the company. It made troubleshooting problems hard. I never knew what the person on the other end knew, what they were using and the impact of the first two on the actual application they had to run.

I ended up writing a user guide to troubleshoot common problems and sent every user that called a copy of the PDF. That was the first knowledge article that helped me. By the end of the six months I was responsible for this (we rotated people on the helpdesk) I could tell you very quickly where the problem was and what options we had to fix the issue. It is one of the reasons that I have great sympathy for helpdesk people. You never know what is calling and what they have on their end. At the end of my first shift, I got both a raise and a promotion. The reason for both was the way I handed the rollout of this application. I ended up working with the company to improve the way they rolled out software in the future. I also knew very quickly that living on a helpdesk was not my future!