Where’s the engineer?

And yet more tales from Sense & Respond

PC users with only one problem often had to make three or four calls – the latter ones with the question: “Where’s the engineer?”

To eliminate this unproductive work, the Sense & Respond Service Desk recommended two changes:

• Engineers should be issued with networked PDA’s so that they could be contacted directly.
• Engineers should be asked for an accurate ETA when first reporting a problem, and this should be passed to the user as a firm promise.

…and can he fix something else while he’s here?

You know what it’s like – an engineer comes to fix problem A and three more people collar him and ask for help with problems B, C and D.

Ordinary engineers often have to say “I’m sorry, you will have to go through the channels and place another call with the helpdesk”

But Sense & Respond changed the support approach and now engineers say: “Is there anything else you’d like me to fix while I’m here?”

How much to train my people on Excel? Precisely when they need it most? Nothing

The Sense & Respond Service Desk identified a lot of ‘how do I…?’ type calls, especially on spreadsheets.

These calls were handled well, but everyone felt sure something could be done to make things better, so with the client’s agreement, Fujitsu introduced remote control of PC’s in one department.

Whenever a caller needed help, he simply rang and the Service Desk agent would operate his cursor remotely, to demonstrate complex features.

The result was delighted users, better Excel skills leading to more sophisticated reports and, eventually, fewer ‘How do I…?’ calls as this point-of-need training took effect.

The cost on top of the standard Help Desk contract? Nothing.

How to get your new password in seconds instead of days…

It’s human to forget passwords, and we all do it, especially if we have an IT security system that requires us to think of a new one every month.

The problem is, in a big organisation, it can take hours to re-set them. Here’s what usually happens:

• 1. The user calls the help desk and his ‘forgotten password’ request is logged and escalated to a technical team.
• 2. The technical team is finite, and already busy, so the request goes on the spike and waits. As does the user.

With an ordinary help desk this delay can stretch from hours to days yet the desk is still meeting its call-handling SLA’s!

But a Sense & Respond Service Desk can do things differently. If the customer agrees, first line agents are trained and equipped to securely reset passwords in one call, in 45 seconds.

So a forgotten password costs less than a minute of work, saving hours of valuable time for the client’s business and costing not a penny more than having one of those ordinary help desks.