re: #209 oaktree

My current and previous company have their 1st level Helpdesk farmed out to a 3rd party. You have to assume that the initial person taking the call has *zero* knowledge about your applications. Their job is using a set of scripts, get the ticket started, and then dumping the ticket into the appropriate support bucket with an appropriate priority on it.

So the issue then becomes communications skills (both the end-user and the Helpdesk tech), the quality of the scripts, and whether the end-user has some understanding of what went wrong in order to properly communicate it.

The scripts are notoriously prone to “magic word syndrome”. If a certain word is mentioned as part of the issue the ticket gravitates into certain buckets even when the issue is completely different. At the current company a magic word is “SAP” that gets the SAP Functional Support bucket tickets having to do with a bad SAP GUI (desktop issue) and so on. At my previous employer a certain app server was identified as the “Railtrac server” even though it supported 7-8 applications. So every problem with an app on that server found its way to the Railtrac support analyst. Which for eight years was me.

Needless to say I’m not a great fan of 3rd party Helpdesk implementations.

All system malfunctions must be logged at the “Abandon All Hope Desk” even if the person that you know is able to fix it is sitting at the next cubicle. And the “Abandon All Hope Desk” happens to be located in the Phillipenes.