Help Desks and call centers typically handled only inbound and outbound phone enquiries. Over the past few years, with the explosion of Internet usage, and an increasingly sophisticated customer base, Help Desks have had to morph into handling increasingly electronic methods of support, hence e-Support.

Many colleges and universities support multiple software and hardware platforms, and rely on students as the first level of support. If you are located near a college or university, contact their help desk to see if you can work out an internship program.

Increasingly, with solution sets too complex to be solved by one person or group, the Help Desk staff needs to call upon multiple groups with multiple skill sets to effectively address an issue. Common techniques include call tracking and management software that can keep track of who called, when they called and why they called. Such systems will allow you to maximize resource usage by letting the group know when one person has taken the call. Used properly, this can help identify trends which can lead to pro-active service.

The most important thing to remember here is to take into account what makes most sense for your organization. Often a simple call tracking feature will enable you to justify a more comprehensive solution to upper management if that is what your ultimate goal is. There is nothing implicitly wrong with starting one way and ending up in another, as long as you are making progress towards what you want!

Whether or not you decide on automation, too often the basic call flow is missing. What happens when someone calls the help desk? What procedures should someone follow when they cannot resolve a call? Are there documented procedures for escalating a call? Is there more than one level of support? Are there procedures for handling information exchange between them? Is there a list of "supported" hardware/software? At what level do you support them? What platforms do you support?

According to the Gartner Group, the average number of contacts per customer will almost have doubled by 2004, rising to almost three calls per end user per month. Meta Group adds that at the same time, the duration of these calls is going to go up 15 percent each year. In recognition of these changes, the Gartner Group recently said that each analyst can no longer support 400 end users. Instead, the number is now more like 250, and this doesn't consider any major new system implementations, changes in operating systems or replacement of legacy systems.

At GHDSi, we work diligently to provide quality technical support services to your environment through ongoing Quality Assurance methodologies such as silent monitoring of the support calls by supervisory staff. We also review the trouble documentation for accuracy and timeliness of action. Service Levels are designed and agreed upon such as how quickly we will answer the phone, how quickly we can get a "live body" to the trouble site according to the Severity of the problem and the average percentage of calls we must resolve at first touch. Ongoing communications and knowledge sharing is key to the success of the support structure.

Throughout the process of working with GHDSi, we will provide information on the support industry and typical benchmarks for Key Performance Indicators within our industry. We recommend the Help Desk Institute's course on Help Desk Management in order to gain a better understanding. For more information, please go to HDI's website. www.thinkhdi.com

An average user calls the help desk 1.25 times per month. Given this statistic, a population of 1,000 users would generate an average of 1,250 calls per month.

Per-incident pricing typically allows you to contact the help desk multiple times until the parent issue is resolved. Per-incident pricing is only quoted for Tier 3 incidents where the issue requires research by the Help Desk Senior Analysts. Per-call pricing is the most common in our industry whereby the analysts provide support on today's most common applications and networks.