Help Desk System: Architecture & Requirements
Abstract
Professional quality handling of customer service issues requires some kind of problem tracking system, what coordinates the work of multiple people who may need to work on the problem. This document explores competing uses, architectures, and desirable features of integrated internal help desk systems.
Purposes of a Help Desk System.
A good customer service system should serve many purposes:
1) Short-term memory and communication. The primary purpose of the help desk system is to act as short-term memory about specific problems for the company as a whole. In a multi-operator or multi-shift environment, calls and problem updates come in without regard to who worked last on a particular problem. Problems extend over shifts, and problems may be addressed by several different operators on the same shift. The trouble ticket provides a complete history of the problem, so that any operator can come up to speed on a problem and take the next appropriate step without having to consult with other operators who are working on something else, or have gone home, or are on vacation. In single-room environment, an operator may ask out loud if someone else knows about or is working on a problem, but the system should allow for more formal communication as well.
2) Scheduling and work assignment. Customer service center typically work with many simultaneous problems with different priorities. An on-line help desk system can provide real time (or even constantly displayed and updated) lists of open problems, sorted by priority. This would allow operators to sort their work at the beginning of a shift, and to pick their next task during the shift. It also would allow supervisors and operators to keep track of the current workload, and to call in and assign additional staff as appropriate.
It may be useful to allow current priorities of tickets change according to time of day, or in response to timer alerts.
3) Alarm clock. Typically, most of the time a trouble ticket is open, it is waiting for something to happen. There should almost always be a timer associated with every wait. If a ticket is referred to a phone company, there will be an escalation time before which the phone company is supposed to call back with an update on the problem. For tickets referred to remote site personnel, there may be other more arbitrary timeouts such as "Monday morning". Tickets referred to local engineers or programmers should also have timeouts ("Check in a couple of days if you don't hear back from me"). A good help desk system will allow a timeout to be set for each ticket. This alarm will generate an alert for that ticket at the appropriate time. Preferably, the system should allow text to be attached to that timer with a shorthand message about what the alert involves, e.g. "Remind Site: TT xxx". The full story can always be found by checking the trouble ticket.
The Alarm Clock can also assist (or enforce!) administrative escalation. An escalation timer could automatically be set based on the type and severity of the problem.
4) Oversight by engineers and customer representatives. Companies frequently offer more than one product, or at least have people (engineers, customer representatives, etc) who are responsible for different aspects of corporate workflow. For these individual representatives, summaries of trouble tickets can be filtered by product or by departments, and delivered electronically to the various engineers or site representatives. Each of these reports includes a summary of the relevant previous day's trouble tickets, a listing of older trouble tickets still open, and a section listing recurrent problems. These reports allow the employees to keep aware of the current outages and trends for their particular area of responsibility. The help desk system also allows online access to the details of individual trouble tickets, so those receiving the general reports can get more detail on any of their problems by referencing the trouble ticket number.
5) Statistical analysis. The fixed-form fields of trouble tickets allow categorizations of tickets, which are useful for analyzing overall performance. These include, Mean Time Between Failure and Mean Time to Repair reports for specific products. The fields may also be of use for generating statistical quality control reports, which allow deteriorating products to be detected and serviced before it fails completely. A good help desk system should make this statistical information in a format suitable for spreadsheets and graphics programs.
6) Accountability. Keeping user-complaint tickets facilities the kind of follow through with end-users that generates happy clients and good company image for normal trouble-fixing situations. But also, by their nature, customer service centers deal with crises; they occasionally find themselves with major outages, and angry customers. The help desk system documents the company's efforts to solve problems in case of complaints.
|
