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Steve, Tier 2 Help Desk Analyst, Central Region
Please realize that each job opening for which Getronics hires is different, so the duties of anyone profiled herein may not correspond to those of another person with the same job title.
Q: What's it really like to work on a Getronics help desk?
Steve: On a day-to-day basis, people call in about a particular application or more common questions. These calls are directed first to Tier 1 analysts. If they don't know the answer offhand, they can search the knowledge base [KEWA]. You can search by article number, keyword or drill down based on the application or software name to get to your answer. Getronics has a KEWA class for new employees.
We Tier 2 analysts answer calls that the Tier 1 folks can't resolve. We're the escalation point. If we can't find an answer, we'll contact a Solver. The Solvers are advanced technical folks on our customer's staff. They publish resolutions to issues they handle on their ITDOCS website. We have an account manager contact that interfaces with the Solvers on our behalf.
We check for resolutions and publish them back in KEWA to be readily accessible by our team if those problems arise in the future. The more we can answer ourselves, the better, as it saves time for the caller and helps us stay within our SLA [service level agreement] terms with the customer.
Q: How have you improved the processes you use to respond to customers?
Steve: I've developed some productivity tools to help our analysts respond better. Though I started in this group as Tier 1, I was a training manager at my previous helpdesk, so I took the initiative.
- KIWI is a navigation tree that links directly into KEWA with hot links to the most common issues, like password resets, which saves time. They're like crib notes. When I was a Tier 1, I found I was looking for the same things over and over. I wanted a quick way to get back to the same resolution article. I created it initially for myself; it helped me, so I shared it with rest of team.
- Everyone had a different flavor of how they responded to questions received via email. The same kinds of questions kept coming to us, but we weren't being consistent in our responses. So I created a javascript web page where you select the question from a pulldown menu, and it generates a standard response.
Q: What special situations can arise, and how do you deal with them?
Steve: A few times a month, a server might go down. We'll get 15-20 calls in a few minutes and we know something's wrong. So I'll generate a Whiteboard with our server team: It's a master ticket, and analysts can attach their tickets to our Whiteboard. Our server team has a point of contact with the customer, the telephone company and the hardware device vendors – any one of which might be the cause. Without the Whiteboard, our Tier 1's wouldn't know what's wrong and wouldn't know where to attach the ticket.
Or we might need software. With so many client sites to cover, we have Approvers for each site. Some software is licensed. Approvers are site managers who say what software is OK to install. We must email them the approval request to purchase the license. The customer uses about 1,000 apps, and there are about two dozen needing licenses. Microsoft Office is what we support 100%, but we can do first-level support – for example, if an app is not loading or not printing, we can do an uninstall/reinstall -- on any of the 1,000 geophysical apps. If the problem requires in-depth knowledge of the app, we'd give it to a Solver. I made a spreadsheet for our Tier 2 analysts indicating who the appropriate Solvers are for different problem areas.
What takes up a lot of our day is answering Tier 1 questions and the keeping the knowledge base [KEWA] up to date. The questions we receive are pretty repetitive. But things are always changing on the client side. Two to three times a month we get something new. They'll have a new app and want us to support parts of it. Our SDMs [service delivery managers] determine to what extent.
Q: How do you train people for new things?
Steve: We'll ease the Tier 1's into those processes. On new stuff to support, we'll train: We tell them we have new tabs [in Vantive, our help desk trouble ticket system] and these apps go with these tabs. The training is usually very informal -- we often can just send out an email, and follow up to make sure the Tier 1's ticket them properly in Vantive. With help of my team manager, I created a sheet in KIWI that allows for a quick search and takes you to the right Vantive tab. The Tier 1's may not be solving problems on these new apps, [but rather] just creating tickets and properly coding them so they go to the right Solver on the client side.
KEWA takes you through step-by-step what to do on a problem, so people can usually self-train. But I review Tier 1 tickets and if I see something that's off, I'll do a one-on-one training. We walk through the procedure once or twice. That typically runs from 30 minutes to 1 hour. We have enough coverage so we can pull someone off the phones if need be for this [training, and someone else can pick up the slack].
Q: Notwithstanding the thousands of skills-building courses available free to employees on Getronics Virtual University, is more elaborate training provided for customer-specific issues?
Steve: Longer trainings are rare. We occasionally take people off for half a day -- like sending Tier 1's over to the customer to work on-site with the desktop group there to get a feel for what they do. They enjoy the time away and meeting the people they work with. They like seeing the work environment, seeing what they [customer's staff] do with these apps. It makes a big difference.
Tier 2's may get longer stints at customers to handle special situations. For example, when a customer was combining two client facilities, there was a lot of work to be done. Because I knew the contract so well, I was started there and ending up worked on-site for seven months. I was handling as many tickets as each of their Solvers!
The client is flexible and encourages us to work on-site. For example, they were short-handed during the Super Bowl with people not showing up, so we sent one of our guys over there.
Q: Do people on the team like their work?
Steve: Look at our low turnover. Every Tier 1 has been here for over a year. Training someone completely new happens maybe three times a year. We'll have the new analyst shadow another Tier 1 first, then start taking calls, and I'll be listening in. The other Tier 2 analyst will pick up the slack on my regular work.
I've worked on some high-turnover desks elsewhere. It has to do with procedures on the desk, and the management. We have a very good team, we don't have a Gestapo mentality. Procedures are well-documented. Some places try to make you successful or get you out fast. But here you have the tools to handle the calls and the support of management, so there's no push to turnover. That makes it a great place to work.
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7:00am: I arrive--my shift runs to 4pm. The other Tier 2 analyst works 9a-6p. I have to watch the queue to make sure we're not missing any calls. If there's a call in queue not being answered, I'll jump in or have a Tier 1 do it. I make sure emails are caught up, both customer account emails and my own. I watch the inboxes. We get calls by phone, web-based form submissions or via email. I check all those queues from 7a-9a until the other Tier 2 arrives.
9:00am: He and I share watching the queues, which frees us up to start working on KEWA updates or talk with our SDM [Service Delivery Manager] who interfaces with the customer. Sometimes the customer's own liaison talks to us directly about ongoing issues. If it's a new item, such as which Solver gets assigned which new issue, the two liaisons discuss that themselves.
I'm monitoring calls, answering Tier 1 questions, make sure all SLAs [Service Level Agreements] are being met. Our Team Manager will send us the previous day's, week's or month's [help desk performance] numbers. But I can tell by monitoring the queues if we're meeting SLAs. If it escalates past a certain level, I know it will blow an SLA, so I intercede.
11:00am: We can eat out or at our desk for lunch hour. I'll usually grab a sandwich from the cafeteria and come back. I don't like to leave my desk. I usually working through lunch, or I update KIWI -- I add to that daily.
12:00pm: I review [problematic] tickets with Tier 1's after my lunch hour. I have a good relationship with them, partly because I've worked as a Tier 1 since 1995 at two other companies so I can work with them on their level. I don't like to wait to build a case against someone, Gestapo-style. I like to work with them and catch things early.
2:00pm: Make sure we're meeting SLAs. Though I get reports daily from my team manager in the morning, this is usually when I have time to review them. He generates KEWA usage reports to see how often the Tier 1's are accessing KEWA, an SLA report, and a customer satisfaction report. The satisfaction surveys are on a 1-5 scale. You can tell if someone is doing poorly on their tickets: they tend to use KEWA less. Symposium is a useful tool, too. It's the software tied into our phone system that calculates when the analysts login, how long it takes to handle calls, how long they took for breaks, and how long people were put on hold. Symposium also tells me how long the queue is.
4:00pm: My shift is over and I'm wrapping up. Now the duties are in the other Tier 2's hands until he leaves for the day.
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