Expanding Man

The End

I have resigned.

5 Reasons Helpdesk Work is Tough -- Reason 3

Although I can't speak for everyone -- well, I shouldn't -- I think I can offer up some of the most common reasons why working on a helpdesk is tough. The following reasons are certainly colored by my experience here at Dove, which is quite a relaxed place from what I know. Nevertheless, I have worked at a few and I think these things are universal.

3. A Legacy of Undervaluation

For so long, technical support was free. Not only was it free, but you spoke to very well-trained agents. Sometimes those agents were part or full-time developers on the very product you were calling about! That was, I suppose, the Golden Age of Technical Support. Agents could solve anything, it was all free, and, perhaps, chocolate sprang forth from rivers and bayous. (But I digress ... and am hungry.)

Agents have to deal with that legacy today, especially at places that have gone to a for-pay model.

Read any book about how to start a business. It will explain: When you price something, consumers place exactly that value on it. And their expectations don't change. But businesses have realized the real cost behind support. (It pretty much stuck out as software prices decreased.) And they're doing anything they can to reduce that cost -- except, of course to do more to make users aware of support's cost and complexity. Yes, the product is great and it's likely to work, but those scenarios are common. User-space is anything but common.

But aside from all that, at the end of the line is the agent who hears the same thing day-in/day-out, "This used to be free! If I pay, you better fix my problem or else."

(You might wonder why the answer isn't more simple, like "Write bug-free code." Unfortunately, development is pretty tough and perfection is nigh-impossible. Read Dreaming In Code for a good example of how things work behind the scenes.)

5 Reasons Helpdesk Work is Tough -- Reason 2

Although I can't speak for everyone -- well, I shouldn't -- I think I can offer up some of the most common reasons why working on a helpdesk is tough. The following reasons are certainly colored by my experience here at Dove, which is quite a relaxed place from what I know. Nevertheless, I have worked at a few and I think these things are universal.

2. Mental Fatigue

Techs are rarely filing cabinets, the solution always behind a manila envelope. Just ask. But they are expected to be. They're also expected to be crisis managers, therapists, soothsayers and surgeons. During the life of a typical call, the technician is expected to create a relationship with the caller, establish rapport, troubleshoot a problem, then provide a creative solution.

Sometimes you will get through those steps quickly, especially when you have experience with the caller. But any one thing can thwart that compact series of steps. A very angry caller, for instance, delays rapport, especially if the technician has never been trained to handle rage.

All of this, of course, weighs on you as you take call after call. Even with breaks, you can certainly find yourself not firing as quickly as you did earlier that morning, or even during the next call. If the fatigue leads to a longer call because, try as you might, you just can't rattle your brains hard enough to remember that darn issue the current calls seems to imitate, you might just wind up with a smaller bonus next month.

This of course, leads to more anxiety. And to more fatigue.

Excellent article on the new I.T.

I follow ReadWriteWeb exactly for this reason. Today's article about I.T. 2.0 is exciting and explores the blend of current social networking and cloud services that is bound to happen soon.

I.T. 2.0 - ReadWriteWeb

Losing it.

I freely admit that I lost it today at the helpdesk. I mentioned previously that one of the constant frustrations of working here is the difficulty we have getting information necessary to help users. In some cases, rare though they may be, this has resulted in a user complaining about our ability to operate effectively.

That happened today.

Some time back, we opened the helpdesk to one of our customers' clients. We did it under a little duress. The customer's client started calling with no warning from our customer. So, we tried to help, as we are bound to do, but it was a losing proposition most of the time because our client had been making very large-scale changes to the company's architecture.

I tried to have a meeting about it with them by phone one day. They said to me that they had trouble getting us data because they're too busy and, well, it's not necessary anyway if we knew what we were doing.

I lost it that day, too. I told them to deal with my boss and hung up.

Unfortunately, that's what it took to get the ship righted. Suddenly they became sweetness-and-light sending us all manner of data, including the data we needed for their new customer.

But old habits die hard and bad first-impressions are hard to erase. The end users don't trust us. As I see it, however, we were set up to fail.

Today one of my techs took a call from one of the end users. From what I know, and have no reason to disbelieve, the user was very confused about how he works. He gave my tech erroneous information for over 20 minutes and couldn't find saved data about what the user wanted to do. During the call, my tech calls the primary technical contact at our customer. This person is in some location that contains crying babies, power tools, and bad wireless signals. Ultimately, he says he doesn't know what the user is talking about, leaving my tech in a bind.

My tech finally figures out what the user wants and makes it happen.

Of course, this didn't prevent the user from calling our customer and complaining about how the helpdesk doesn't work.

My boss asked me to look over it. I did. Inappropriately. I suggested to my boss that the user stop being an "asshole" and that they should "leave the helpdesk" and "go to hell." My boss is very angry with me right now. She does not care for cursing.

My friend Ellen visited over the weekend. She is an illustrator. She was an expat from Wisconsin when I lived in New Orleans. At the time, she had been pursuing a dream of being an independent illustrator. I pursued my dream of being a freelance writer. I left my dream and she continued.

During the visit, she asked me about my job. I told her a little about it, but that I didn't care to talk about it. In fact, I haven't really wanted to think about the job since my trip to Orlando. The deep-down truth is I am not happy and haven't been for years. This job notwithstanding. Her visit and innocent question has led me to confront my anger. But I'm not able to deal with it. Not now.

So, since being back I have re-exposed myself to the helpdesk in dribs and drabs. Each step of the way, I get closer to the cranky jerk that went on vacation, the person I didn't want to be when I came back. But there's more. There's seething anger. There's bitterness. There's that trapped feeling. I feel desperate. Not a good place to be.

Autotask's Rebirth

Last year Autotask went through a rebirth of sorts. They updated the interface to make it look more Web 2.0 and moved some stuff around. Although they announced the changes well ahead of time, I didn't know about them and was a little lost for awhile trying to find my old form fields and pull-downs.

Well, they're about to make some new changes. They announced them to users logging in this morning. The Community site has some images, which I am hesitant to post since only registered Autotask users can get in to see them. I may just do it later when they make the announcement more public.

Anyway, here's are some select quotes from the letter I've received:

"...dramatic change to the look and feel..."
"...have also retained virtually all of the current mechanism..."
"...Roger Ebert gave it two thumbs up..."

That last one is not true, but it could be...

It's scheduled for a roll-out at the end of June. The comments on the Community forum tend to hover around the sluggishness of the current interface. I agree. The new interface is slow. (In Vista it's even slower, but that could be my machine.) They promise they are working to fix it.

More when I can post it.   

Update on Bomgar and Tier 1

I have been playing with Bomgar a little bit over the last week. It's a fairly interesting product and when you buy the full version it's customizable in the extreme. I was able to make remoting for our users a very simple affair. The steps are:

1. Go to URL.
2. Click name of agent.
3. Run the downloading executable.
4. Request remote control of the user's desktop, at which point they grant/deny.

This is one way I was able to configure the service. You can require session codes, for instance, which adds another layer of security or requiring the use to fill out a form.

In the end, we probably won't use it. We're likely to use a portion of Kaseya. Kaseya does many, many things, but one of those things is on-demand remoting. I am hesitant to compare it directly to Bomgar since the primary reason we're likely to choose it is the price. We won't be paying anything extra for this  Kaseya functionality.

There is one drawback that concerns me. Kaseya uses an Active X dropper for its on-demand remote. I think this a slightly more complicated situation that Bomgar since the user on the phone may not have the ability to install Active X controls. Bomgar uses an executable that, to my current knowledge, does not require any sort of administrative level privileges.

I will test this over the next few days.

Just a quick one tonight...

Great day with a nice evening. I finished the project, which is a load off. The work was quite tedious, but it's done. Hopefully that outside desk will have some better success this weekend.

I started a new diet this week and have been very successful with it. I am encouraged. Weeeh!

A really good friend is coming tomorrow from Chicago. I expect I'll be quite busy. ;-) Thank goodness for weekends!

Superhighway

Today was my first real day back at Helpdesk. The last few days I had been able to take it slow. It's tough to predict Helpdesk volume and while I suppose I hoped this week would be slow, I didn't really know. I could have just as easily come back to skyrocketing volume.

But it was slow and I was able to think about things and consider projects and the next steps therein. Today saw me dive deep into one of the projects. I'm prepping an outside team to take calls for us overnight and on the weekends. This involves plugging a bunch of data into a series of forms that will get presented to the techs during calls. It's tedious work and there isn't a lot of data to give them.

Indeed, one of the issues that we consistently have at this Helpdesk is lack of information. In a lot of respects, we operate like many smaller IT firms. We walk into a company and don't know what's going on and we have very little power to make things better. This sounds like a cop-out -- it is to some extent -- but most of these customer types simply can't or won't afford the things that lend stability to the organization.

This leads to a lot of time needed to simply discover What's Going On. It's harder when you're remote. All of our remote technologies notwithstanding, missing or incomplete information can turn a five minute call into 30 minutes. Few things are more frustrating than knowing a tiny bit of forethought on the part of the IT company would have saved me a heck of a lot of time.

But everyone has this problem. It's a constant stressor for Helpdesks, IT Companies, Corporations... There's a lot of blame and sympathy to go around.

So, I'm entering this psuedo-data into the forms for this overnight Helpdesk. They actually do a pretty good job considering what little they have. What's most encouraging, however, is that the IT company realizes this situation is difficult. They've made wonderful progress in getting everything organized. They have it harder than most, however. They manage the IT services (among other things) for dozens of sports-themed locations all over the U.S. Each site has a "computer guy" who likes to do things his own way. It's going to take them a long time pull it all together, but they are doing it.

Beyond that one project, of course, I was taking calls. I handled a slightly difficult one and was able to really see my descent into frustration and anger. Fortunately, I came out on top in the end. It's helping me clarify an entry I'm putting together for the blog about the five biggest reasons why working a helpdesk is so tough.

The Curse of The Eternally Urgent

This is an oldie, but a goodie. Great words of wisdom from David Allen. Most helpdesk people (and their bosses) would be wise to read this. And might I add a "dammit" to that? At the risk of making the article urgent, of course.