Support Strategies: Mastering Help Desk Excellence

Discover the meaning, principles & benefits of the Shift-Left support model approach & best-practice implementation strategies

IT departments have always lived in a world of balancing two opposing activities with limited resources:

1. Maintaining user productivity by responding when something breaks (an Incident) or a user request for services (a Service Request).
2. "Maximizing the number of successful service and product changes by ensuring that risks have been properly assessed and authorizing changes." ¹

What makes this juggling a challenge is the same high-level skills for planning, testing, and implementing changes are also the same resources required for resolving more complicated escalated incidents. Anyone that works in IT is familiar with firefighting interruptions. You are in your cube with your head around a time-sensitive change project when you receive a new incident that cannot wait. If you only had more people, then you could split the tasks between project management people and operational people. But is that really going to happen? So, what does happen is that you take the time to help out the users and skimp on the change project because projects are also time sensitive.

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From the right tools to adequate staffing, customer service can turn out to be an expensive venture for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Most of the expenses incurred come from in-house teams, usually those working in a call-center. If customers get off of the phone with your in-house team and still don't have a resolution to their issue, that can also be seen as both time and money wasted. This is especially true if the customer decides to forego your business thanks to that particular experience.

According to Hannah Steiman of Peak Support, there are a few ways in which in-house customer service can become costly:

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With continued growth in computer and hand-held device use in the lives of many brings increasing technical questions and problems that arise. And so, the field of supporting these systems grows along with it, which brings business opportunities for entrepreneurs, and employment opportunities for support personnel.

But there are different types of support needs accompanied by varying required responsibilities and skills. The following are the differences between, and skills required for, three common areas of support: Help Desk, Technical Support, and Desktop/Deskside Support.

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Help desks are typically grouped according to their form of deployment, the size of a client's business and whether the software's source code is accessible and easy to alter. When searching for the perfect help desk, you must take these elements into consideration. The following is an explanation of the five main types of help desk examples currently on the market:

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When it comes to cloud computing, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) act as both the structure and warranty of the terms of the relationship between the consumer and provider. SLAs that are tailored toward services in the cloud often include information that differs from other agreements in similar industries.

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What specifically needs to be included in a service level agreement? Which aspects are described in an SLA? In this post, we explain the 6 common elements of a service contract.

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It is no secret that in the digital age, convenience and instant gratification are king. Convenience and speed are evident everywhere from cloud servers to text message jargon. Everything is designed and cultivated to be as quick as possible. But perhaps some things are meant to happen just a little bit slower.

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