For purposes of this book, we will define a Help Desk as a formal organization that provides support functions to users of the company’s product, services, or technology. Let’s break this statement down and analyze it phrase by phrase. A formal organization that. Support can be a full-time job or part of someone’s job; for example, a programmer may also take phone calls with questions on the software he or she is coding. But a Help Desk is an organized effort with an expressed purpose.
A Help Desk can be staffed by one person wearing many hats or by literally thousands of people supporting scores of functions in the business. Provides support functions. This can be reactive, as in “I sit by the phone and wait for someone to call,” or proactive, looking for ways to make users more productive and effective in their jobs. Support can be break/fix, as in “my printer jammed,” training, as in “the correct way to enter a purchase order on the system is…,” or behind the scenes administration, as in “keeping the network up all day every day.” …to users of the company’s products, services, or technology. The users (or customers, to sound friendlier) are the ones calling or are in need of the services you provide. The products, services, and technology are the point of the need. It may be a product your company manufacturers, a PC, printer, software, or telephone.
Help Desks are not as well known as applications development, database administration, or network management. You cannot get a college degree majoring in Help Desk; for that matter, I have never even seen a college class on the topic. I worked for years in a Help Desk before I could get my mom to understand what I did. Granted, I didn’t mind that she told her friends, “My son runs the computer department,” for lack of a better explanation! What you see is the recognition of the Help Desk profession. The Bureau of Labor estimates there are over 450,000 Help Desk professionals now employed. The Help Desk Institute feels this number is closer to 560,000, which will double in the next ten years. College majors may not exist for a Help Desk career, but certifications and professional organizations are popping up all over. It is even fair to say that if you consider yourself a quality IT shop that will expand into the electronic commerce arena, you are behind the times if you don’t have a formal Help Desk in place. You are behind because service, for customers or technology, has taken over electronic commerce and those businesses that cannot deliver quality customer service will not succeed in the long term.
Post a Comment