Help desk jobs sometimes can have an undeserved bad reputation. When most customers are asked to picture a help desk worker, the image that comes to mind is not a smiling, friendly, helpful employee, but instead, a pale guy in a room with fluorescent lighting, listening to the irate ravings of computer users who are on a rampage because their browsers crashed or their Palm Pilots won't interface with e-mail properly.

There are two basic ingredients that make it imperative for any business, and in particular for a call center, to maintain a low employee turnover - time and money. When people leave, new people have to be hired and trained. The hiring and training process takes time and resources away from other critical functions. This is especially true, if the learning curve is steep or if it takes a considerable period of time to train new employees to a point where they are of value to the business. Therefore, if turnover can be kept small, the call center benefits. The question that companies must answer, then, is how best to keep turnover small and a stable, trained workforce in place.

The help desk in any organization has a crucial mission to perform and one that is integral in helping the business accomplish a strategic plan. The help desk director should be prepared in advance to explain the help desk抯 mission to senior management and justify not only the operation抯 costs, but show in detail exactly how and why the primary missions are being accomplished. The best way to do this is for help desk management to have a formal presentation on tap and constantly updated, that explains the help desk抯 added value to the business. It should include everything from metrics to a variety of reports about people, financials, and processes.

Dissatisfaction with the first level supervisor one of the most common reasons that service professionals cite as the primary reason for leaving their jobs and moving to another employer. It seems intuitive then, that if a service center wishes to keep front-line employees, a primary goal must be to ensure that management provides for those employees needs in the best possible way. Yet, when turnover increases, driving up recruiting and training costs, senior management generally does not attribute the source to poor performance by supervisors and managers. Setting supervisory goals in five critical areas can improve results throughout the entire contact or service center. They are: training, attrition, leadership, attendance, and team performance.

In an effort to generate additional sales, some companies have done the unthinkable by asking service agents to generate sales during service calls. For these companies, this change is definitely working. One company reported that it increased sales dramatically by implementing this change over a short period of time and even exceeded its internal targets for improvement.

There is no escaping the cost-cutting trend that has been impacting nearly all phases of business operations over the past few months. Even corporate help desks and call centers, traditionally one of the most risk-averse components of a business, felt the affects in 2003. These affects have been consistent across a lot of different types of companies. Even the typical metrics that are used to evaluate performance in other parts of a company, such as revenue, may not apply to corporate help desks. Therefore, the main functions have to be quantified and measured in some other way. Two metrics, call times and costs per incident are particularly important. These two measures are most likely to produce consistent, repeatable, accurate evaluation of help desk functions and allow comparisons between centers.

There are several yearly salary surveys that gather and analyze information about that nation抯 tech support industry. These surveys tend to show that some major changes occurred in 2003. While those changes were positive for those who are just entering that particular employment category for the first time, they may have a generally more negative impact on the industry as a whole, and on customers and customer relations. 2003 was a tough year in the software industry, perhaps reflecting declining economic conditions throughout this economic sector. However, the news is either good or bad, depending on the person looking at the data.

If help desk teams are to become leaner entities that meet today's drive for increased efficiency with lower overhead, the roles and the rules that govern these teams have to be reinvented. Many companies are finding that self-directed work teams, given substantial training, and invested with an appropriate level of empowerment, can streamline the help desk process, enabling the process to truly accomplish more tasks with fewer resources.

The help desk can be thought of as a portal through which a company interfaces with its customers. Traditionally, customers have used the phone to call the help desk to request support. When they do, they often have questions. These can be either pre- or post-sales questions. Phone support has a number of drawbacks, however. First, customers may be passed through layers and layers of support personnel and each time need to re-explain the problem. Second, customers may have to leave messages and may not having any assurance that support personnel will address the message that hey are describing. Third, some customers may have to call back repeatedly to get the issue resolved. Fourth, customers may not be able to obtain important information such as pages or specifications. Finally, long waiting queues during new product launches and system upgrades can bother customers. Moreover, phone-based help desk teamwork can be fragmented and too segmented.

It is easy to underestimate the value of a company's help desk or to discount its place as an integral part of business operations. A help desk deals with critical issues of customer satisfaction and return business. Businesses often take help desks for granted and do not give them the attention that they need. How can help desk management show the value of their operations within the larger scope of the business and other functions that are deemed more critical? There are actually a number of ways that managers can analyze particular help desk projects to help illustrate their value and demonstrate the value-added nature of the help desk in general.