Performance vs. Quality in a Help Desk Environment

The very word help in the phrase ‘help desk’ implies a demand for immediate attention. Given the emphasis on immediacy, you might expect that the better the help desk, the faster the response. Speed alone, however, is not enough for a first-rate help desk. The quality of the response counts, too. And it takes the right combination of people, training and technology to maximize the speed and quality of help desk response. Traditional help desks concentrate on performing two well circumscribed functions – handle high volume traffic and ensure “mission critical” performance. Most assessments seem to think these two qualities are linear to each other. For instance, when speed is emphasized, typically shortcuts are taken in the processes and communication that otherwise would have led to quality or lasting value to the customer. On the other hand, emphasizing quality could easily cause too much time on communication and processes that hinder reaching a timely resolution. At best, we can provide an equilibrium of the two.

Since performance is easily defined and measured, let’s look at quality. Quality is defined as the “value to some person”. What this means is the same answer does not satisfy the same people. A technician needs to be able to identify this problem on a daily basis and adjust. As I see it, to an extent, performance provides quality. When dealing with a client on the phone, we are not trained to take into account of the third party that is also involved, the customer. In the fast-paced 21st century of one-click online shopping and credit cards, customers expect more than to have to wait while a simple purchase at a retail store turns into a 5-10 minute affair. When a client calls the help desk, they expect me to have the answer to their problem so they can fix it and get the customer on there way. They do not want to know how the weather is in Connecticut nor do they care about the rash I have. They just want the customer to be taken care of in the quickest way possible. In this type of situation, performance equals quality. It is up to the technician to make the determination when this is appropriate and not. While in the previous situation performance provides quality, in others it does not.

Its been said that there is no good technicians and no bad technicians in our line of work. The reality of the situation is there are. What makes a technician “good” in comparison to “bad” is their ability to take accuracy and client satisfaction and apply it to speed and volume. The balance between performance and quality starts and ends with the technician. The technician needs to be success oriented to help take everything that is provided for him to do his job and use them to their benefit. This continual improvement is what takes his personal need to develop and turns him into a business oriented asset to the company. Most help desk’s first requirement is to hit high percentage targets then look at the first call resolution metrics. While numbers don’t lie, metrics can only show the performance side of a technician. There is no metric to show client satisfaction or just a simple desire to want to better one-self.

How do you promote a healthy balance between quality and speed? The biggest factor holding help desks back when trying to promote quality over performance is throughput. Performance must take a back seat when quality is given a priority. In the case of Ann Taylor’s help desk, the small size of the department will never fully allow quality to take priority over performance. Also in our environment, performance is penalized in the form of the faster you are, the more work you do. Our ACD is setup in such a way that whoever is ready will receive the next call in queue. So someone who is twice as fast as another will take twice as many phone calls, making twice as many tickets and fix twice as many issues. There is no incentive to finish up calls efficiently. Emphasis is taken off of performance when trying to provide quality service so there is no reason not to stay on the phone with a client for as long as it takes. While that would be ideal, in the case of a small help desk throughput drops which in turn cause longer hold times. The amount of time the client is on the phone, both in hold times and actually talk times, is in direct relation to the amount of quality they perceive. We are the gateway to any and all problems regardless of the severity of the issue. Taking a 6 minute phone call to answer a procedural question takes away from time that could be spent dealing with an actual problem of another client. There is no way of knowing when a call comes in or what it will entail. To provide a quality answer that the client is going to get off the phone satisfied, there is no set time limit.

In conclusion, performance and quality are not mutually exclusive. There is no fundamental reason why a technician cannot provide a quality answer in a timely manner. Unfortunately these skills are more learned than taught. Following the points I have made here, it seems the key to a first-rate help desk is neither performance nor quality but a technician that can understand the urgency of both. Adversely, the heart of most help desks seems to be metrics, and while this is understandable, it should not be, by any means, a measure of value. In an example of metrics being flawed, a technician who receives calls and answers them at a high volume rate will leave the client feeling rushed and confused. The technician gets off the call in a timely matter but the client has not been taken care of. First call resolution is based on what the technician feels is resolved and not the client. In another example, a technician could take his time with the client making sure everything is resolved and that there is no further issues to deal with. When checking against the metric, they will show this person as being a poor performer. While numbers don’t lie, they also do not show the human aspect of a call. In those two examples, I have shown how metrics can be misleading, but the real point is that they are both missing key qualities. A technician should have a complete understanding of the issue, the state the client is in and the resolution path that must be taken for each individual call. With this knowledge in hand, accuracy and speed can come together leaving the client pleased with the experience.

Jott is one of my favorite new services this year. Dial a 1-800 number, say who I want to Jott to and speak. In a few minutes my voice is translated into any number of web services Jott supports. Today they added support for Google Calendar so now I can create appointments when I’m on the run by just dialing a number and speaking. Saying “Steve Job’s Macworld Keynote at 9 am on January 15th” is a lot easier than logging into Google Calendar and typing that all out on my iPhone. Thanks to Jott I can now blog, tweet, add a todo and create an appointment without typing a word. Best of all Jott is free.

Digital comic files come in two flavors, CBZ and CBR. They are just renamed ZIP and RAR files containing JPG files. While Quicklook can look at JPG files, it cannot look into a compressed file for them. Over on the arstechnica forums, a user named gheritt has whipped up a Quicklook plugin that allows you to view CBZ files. It displays them inline similar to a PDF file. Only CBZ files work right now. There is no built-in support for RAR compression in OS X 10.5 so CBR files will not work, yet.

Download the file directly from here and install into /Library/Quicklook.

I few weeks ago I discovered Jott, which I found to be amazing convenient when on the run. While it was good for sending me reminders and the occasional Tweet, the one thing I found myself wanting is a way to Jott to my todo list. My todo list of choice just happens to be Remember The Milk. I tried to hack a Jott to RTM using my RTM email but that was a failure. So I sent an email to Jott a few weeks ago and lo and behold, they added a Jott Link for Remember the Milk today. It uses the RTM API so you can select where your tasks are saved. Right now it supports the task name, when it’s due and what it’s tagged with. If your a Remember the Milk user, the ability to call in your tasks epic.

One of the first things I did this month was to give myself an “allowance”. I tend to get carried away with purchases and I’m a sucker for impulse buys so instead of doing the “envelope” method, I went with a more forceful approach.

I’ve given myself $100 allowance a week to live on. On Friday when my paycheck gets direct deposited, I transfer $100 to my Paypal account right away. I only carry my PayPal debit card with me instead of my bank’s debit card. Actually I have my bank card stashed away so its hard to get at. The $100 has to keep my cars gas tank filled, keep me feed and any purchases I’d like to make for myself during the week. Another advantage for me is that it takes 3-4 days to transfer money into my PayPal account from my bank. This curbs the thought of just transferring money onto my card if I want to make a purchase and don’t have enough in my PayPal account at the time.

Due to my work schedule, I tend to eat out ALOT. This was a big money hole for me that I’m trying to fix. Due to my “allowance” I have to be careful when and if I eat out now. If i want to pick up the newest game, comics or DVD this week, I’m going to have to pass when the guys order a pizza at work. To get me eating better, I allow myself to use my bank card if I actually go shopping at a store. This gives me incentive to make a shopping list and try and find the best deals so I don’t have to dip into my allowance.

The second thing I did was to setup an ING Direct Savings account. For the past few months I’m been trying to put money into a savings account at my bank. Problem with that is I always saw what I had in savings which gave me a false outlook on my money situation. I could always move money out of my savings account immediately if I needed extra money. With ING the money is deduced automatically and it goes into a different savings account that I don’t ever have to look at. Plus it offers 4.5% interest. My plan is to forget about that savings account and just let it keep growing and adding interest.

I got a lot of financially rebuilding to do but these are just the first few steps I’m taking. Next month I plan on calling all my creditors and get a “state of the union” from them so I can devise a debt reduction plan.

One of the biggest things I did was remove digg from my RSS reader. Why? Well first off it was my highest traffic feed, so deleting it helped save me hours a day and 2nd, I also go to digg.com anyways to digg articles. There was no real reason to have it in my RSS reader. So now what I do is once a day goto digg.com and look through the last few pages digging and reading as I go.

I can still trim a little more in the way of feeds but for now I’m a lot more productive during the day as I’m not tied to my RSS reader all the time. If I delete my new top traffic feed, techbargians.com, I can save another 2500 articles a month and probably some money too since I won’t see all the great bargains that I “must” have.

As I do workout and running is my main choice for exercise, i own a pair of Nike jet Streams which are about a year old and in great condition. I really don’t need a new pair of Nike’s but thought I would have to buy a pair of Nike+ ones for the kit to work properly. Then came along a post I seen on digg about attaching the sensor any shoe under the laces. While this was brilliant and seemed to work well in all accuracy test, the application was a little “ghetto” to me. This is when i got the bright idea to mod my own Nike’s to have a pocket under the sole and put the receiver in the shoe like the Nike+ shoes do. This way it doesn’t look like my shoes came from goodwill and the receiver will be protected from being lost, getting damaged or hit with water when running in the rain or through puddles.

My Nike Jet Streams

The Nike+iPod Sports Kit

First things first. Needed to open the box and check out the sensor. Its actually quite small and light. A little smaller than i was expecting, which is even better. Here is my Nano next to the receiver and transmitter.

Time to rip open my shoe and get this thing in. Unlaced my right shoe and pulled up the sole.

Found a nice spot under my arch to the transmitter would be someone comfortable and started cutting out a square with a utility knife. I used a pair of small needle nose pliers to tear out the foam as its pretty rubbery and wouldn’t be able to hand. After a few minutes of cutting and sizing and pulling I had a 90% perfect compartment. I could have done deeper but where i picked was the thinnest part of the sole on these shoes.

With the receiver in, not bad if i say so myself.

And here is the final project. As good as new with no cosmetic differences. There is a slight lump under my sole because I didn’t want to go any deeper with these shoes but you stop feeling it as soon as you start walking and when your running its non-existent. They are also very accurate out of the box. Was about .1 off a 1/4 mile and as soon as i calibrated the kit, its now dead on. Since I already had a iPod Nano and a set of Nike’s, i just spent the $29 which is well worth ever penny for this product if you run.

Meet Adam Scott. A few weeks ago he decided he was fed up with shopping, cooking and cleaning so decided to try and live off monkey chow for seven days. During the 7 days, he keep a blog of stats and made a video blog of the whole ordeal. Head over to The Monkey Chow Diaries to see how he made out. I just wish we would have went 30 days, that would have equally interesting and entertaining.

Monkey Chow Out.

Based on an article on 43folders.com the other day, I picked up a Jimi Wallet myself today. I have some Before and After pics up on my Flickr. I’m liking it so far, tho I’m always checking to see if I have my wallet with me
now.

Been listening to the new Taking Back Sunday. I was really looking forward to it and i wouldn’t go as far as saying I’m disappointed but Taking Back Sunday – John Nolan + Major Label = not good. Song writing has taken a turn, even there song titles are now actually lyrics in the songs. �MakeDamnSure� is a great song, lot of TAYF in there. Only other song I’m feeling is �I’ll Let You Live�. But, its only been day one so maybe it will grow one me, who knows.

Google Calender Greasemonkey ToDo List – Nice addon til something official comes from Google themselves.

Officially switching from a Motorola MPx220 and Exchange to a Motorola RAZR and Google Mail and Google Calendar. I’ll post alot more on that later.