Creating a First Class Help Desk - Essential Help Desk Skills 3 Days

OVERVIEW

Customers demand instant solutions and consistently high quality support. Often a help desk is under constant pressure to reduce costs and headcount while at the same time increasing its commitments and service quality. This intensive two-day workshop identifies best Help Desk practices and trends and illustrates ways of reconciling these conflicts.

Objectives

By the end of this workshop, participants will be familiar with best practice in Help Desk management and learn practical ways of improving Help Desk performance while containing costs.

Why you should attend

Customers want exactly what they want, when they want it. And what they want is instant solutions and consistently high quality. Often a help desk is caught in the middle of the gauntlet between the hammers of technical limitations, resource constraints, budget pressure, conflicting priorities and the need to provide excellence in service.

Too often the Help Desk is forced by these constraints into being reactive, rather than proactive. The Help Desk’s terms of reference may not be well defined and its organisation may be ambivalent - especially when it depends on second and third level support from other departments.

Support can be a soft target for cuts, since its benefits are difficult to quantify.

It all sounds depressing: but there are ways to improve the performance and status of the Help Desk and turn it into a proactive weapon to improve overall operational performance: creating the Strategic help Desk.

In this highly interactive, intensive and pragmatic workshop, you will hear the latest thinking on all key challenges of Help Desk management – including technical, organisational, personnel aspects as well as discovering latest trends and information from around the world.

Is the Help Desk going to be automated out of existence? What is the optimum organisation – for global enterprises, for public sector organisations and for Help desks within smaller, dynamic organisations? How can you increase the effectiveness and prestige of the Help Desk?

You will leave this workshop with tools and ideas to enable you to customise your Help Desk for optimum results.

Kingswell brings experience from successful training courses and consultancy in China, the Gulf, Southern Africa and Europe. Be sure to bring your ideas and experiences you wish to discuss. You will find this powerful course stimulating, entertaining – and immensely practical.

Who should attend

Help Desk, Support Centre, Service Desk, Hot Line and Call Centre and Customer Support managers and staff; Problem and Solution managers and teams, second line support personnel; account managers, Building Services managers, Premises managers, Facilities managers; all building industry staff having regular interface with customers.

How you and your organisation will benefit

You will:

Programme

  • Effective Help Desk Models

    Definitions of the Help Desk Expectations of Performance
    Functions of the Help Desk
    Services provided by the Help Desk
    Successful Help Desk models
    ITIL and CobIT
    Performance objectives

  • Positioning your Help Desk for the future

    Scope of Help Desk services
    Understanding and using Critical Success Factors
    Help Desk staffing levels
    Effective use of Help Desk resources
    Defining and developing relationships with other support staff and customers
    Organising for Problem Management
    Integrating Remote Desks
    Co-ordinating and managing a distributed customer support network
    Characteristics of a first-rate Help Desk

  • Management Exercise

  • Charging for Help Desk services

    Benefits of charging
    In-house support charges
    Basis for charging
    Charging - keys to success
    Outsourcing of support services.

  • Quality and the Help Desk

    Understanding the quality processes in a Help Desk
    Using Service Level Agreements to effectively negotiate and manage service expectation
    Managing and meeting the demand for service
    Help Desk service quality indicators
    Assessing customers' needs and expectations

  • Improving Customer Service

    The importance of service to the organisation
    What is customer satisfaction?
    Causes of dissatisfaction
    Ensuring customer satisfaction
    Dealing with complaints

  • Management Exercise

  • Improving Help Desk Productivity

    Understanding customers' needs
    Measuring customer satisfaction to improve service
    How to succeed
    Essential tools for the Help Desk
    Call logging and problem escalation procedures
    Using Help Desk data to market, manage and influence
    Strategies for preventing problems, assuring quality and handling difficult problems

  • Help Desks: The Next Generation

    Automating Problem Management, Solution Provision and Case Handling
    Strategies for improving call and problem management
    Are all problems equal? - setting priorities
    Selecting the 'right' tools: software, case reasoning, the internet - and more
    Structuring databases to help solve problems and improve service
    Real costs and effort involved in implementing automated Help Desk tools

  • Gaining Top Management Support

    Trends affecting the Help Desk
    Using new technologies in the Help Desk
    The Help Desk of the future
    Understanding top management's interests and expectations
    Management challenges
    Management expectations
    How to effectively justify a Help Desk
    Successful techniques for influencing management

  • Keeping Staff on Top

    Knowledge, skills and abilities required by Help Desk staff
    Techniques for influencing customers and colleagues
    Strategies for keeping staff motivated
    Finding and retaining the ' right' people
    Techniques for improving communications and problem solving ability
    Techniques for avoiding staff burnout

Workshop Leader

Yvonne Gunn

 

 

 

 

Books by Kingswell Consultants

Books on Service Management

Hiles, A. N. The Complete Guide to IT Service Level Agreements, Matching Service Quality to Business Needs.. ISBN 0-9641648-2-5 published by Rothstein Associates Inc.  The standard work on IT Service Level Agreements.

Hiles, A. N. E-Business Service Level Agreements: Strategies for ISPs, ASPs, *SPs and CLECS.  Published by Rothstein Associates Inc.  The first book to deal specifically with e-commerce Service Level Agreements.

Hiles, A. N. Service Level Agreements, Winning a Competitive Edge for Supply and Support Services.  ISBN 0-9641648-4-1published by Rothstein Associates Inc. This book applies Service Level Agreements to services other than IT. Real case studies and example SLAs are provided ranging from Human Resources, Logistics, through Training, Livestock Handling, Logistics and Field Service Engineering.

Hiles A.N. and Gunn, Dr. Y. Creating a Customer-Focused Help Desk: How to Win and Keep Your Customers. Published by Rothstein Associates Inc. ISBN 0-9641648-6-8 This book has the support of the Help Desk Institute www.helpdeskinst.com

Books on Business Continuity

Hiles A.N. Business Continuity Management: Best Practice. Published by Rothstein Associates Inc. ISBN 0-9641648-3-3.  This book explicitly covers all the ten areas of business continuity competence required for membership of the Disaster Recovery Institute International (DRII) and the Business Continuity Institute (BCI).

Hiles A.N. Enterprise Risk Assessment & Business Impact Analysis – Best Practices ISBN 1-931332-12-6 Published by Rothstein Associates Inc. Covers many techniques and methods of risk and impact assessment with detailed examples and checklists.

e-Publication. Kingswell books on Business Continuity, Service Level Agreements and  Help Desk Management will shortly be available by page download in conjunction with Rothstein Associates Inc and Books24x7.com.

New and updated books. Existing  books Business Continuity Management – Best Practice and IT Service Level Agreements have been extensively updated. See our products page or visit www.rothstein.com .

All the above books can be obtained from:

Rothstein Associates Inc.
4 Arapaho Road
Brookfield
Connecticut
0608-3104 USA

www.rothstein.com

e-mail pjr@rothstein.com

Telephone: USA: 1-888-ROTHSTEIN
Worldwide: +1 203 740 7400

Hiles A.N. Guide to Risk Management. Published by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales.

Hiles A.N. and Barnes, P. (Editor and main contributor) The Definitive Handbook of Business Continuity Management, John Wiley & Sons, 1999, ISBN 0 471 98622 4.

Hiles, A.N. (contributor), Croner’s Purchasing and Supply Guide to I.T., 1994, ISBN 1 85524 271 0

Hiles, A.N. (contributor), Guide to Business Continuity Management, 1999, for the Confederation of British Industry by Caspian Publishing

Hiles A.N. (contributor) Business Continuity Management, 2000, Institute of Directors / Department of Trade & Industry.

 

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