A good support staff can be measured in part by their adherence to the processes in place for it is through a smooth process that a lean team can handle an extraordinary number of tickets. Often missed is the understanding that the processes which are so tirelessly pursued but also be nimble enough to adjust to the company’s support landscape. That’s a lot of fancy words to say no matter how well designed your processes are, they will need to change on a regular basis. Sadly, the management of the service desks are the ones needing to learn this lesson the most.

In order to create a strong team, equal to the importance of good process, is the need to educate the users of the process that it will constantly be in flux. Instead of fighting to keep the machine in lock-step with the process, work to keep the process in sync with the machine. Empower your process QA employees to proactively watch the changes coming down the line through the corporate IT strategy, your change management forums and the top ten call list and derive version changes to the process. In order to keep the processes clear enough so that folks can stick to them, manage the change of the process like you’d manage your IT. Document the needs, prioritize the changes and implement them on a regular schedule with appropriate documentation.

By tactically leading the change in process, your Service Desk team will be ahead of the support curve and will look like the enabler that they should be instead of the messy hurdle so many support teams become.

As I was watching this video about the use of Green Screens I started thinking of how many times Help Desks give up on a good idea because they do not have all the resources they need. I began to wonder what opportunities exist to make use of augmented reality in serving customers. If your organization could benefit from a walk up counter but you don’t have enough staff, what if you used a video link to one of your call reps? I remember running across a great web site where the author created motorcycle maintenance pages without the use of human models.

There must be a number of different ways stage craft can be used to make the experience better for the customer. If you really want to spruce up your service, you can use actual green screen technology with Apple’s iChat to place a much more appealing background behind you when you talk to your customers.

The most basic approach would be to simply hang a curtain behind your walk up counter so the customer doesn’t have to see the mess of gear and cables behind your service counter.

Everyone benefits from having a clear set of goals. Easily defined targets of performance to work towards and with which to consistently measure ones performance. Now there are a number of definitions of “Goals” in the work environment but for the sake of this article, I’m going to stick to the group of goals that reside between one’s metrics (the specific actions measuring one’s performance) and long range career goals (for example, working towards a promotion into the Desktop team). I’m also going with the assumption that the Technician position is one of working directly with the customer and lower on the job list than a more advanced Analyst or Engineer who may be performing more development or management work.

Technician goals, like all job goals, should be clear, concise, easy to understand and supportive of the company’s overall strategic plan. Goals need to be developed through a conversation between the Help Desk management and the technicians. While most teams will have shared goals, there also needs to be room for a couple individual goals specific to each employee. For example, while raising the team’s customer service scores is great for a group goal, you miss the opportunity for the individual to work on their own areas of improvement. By providing the opportunity for individualized goals, one technician may have a goal of producing knowledge base articles while another employee has a goal around the processing of peer performance numbers. There also needs to be a balance between hard skill goals like Call Resolution and soft skill goals such as Leadership, Communication or Work Methods.

Once you have your goals defined, you need to look at proper weighting. By this I mean you not all goals should carry the same amount of importance in one’s review. An example here is lowering the Leadership goal for an entry level technician but increasing the importance of acquiring certifications to help promote training. This varied weighting helps the Technician prioritize their focus.

After you have worked out your goals, you can start designing the specific methods of measurement which become your metrics. While designing metrics is a whole other conversation, I will say make sure the metrics you do create are consistently measurable and that your system(s) have the ability to capture and manipulate the data. Too often I come across goals and metrics that are well thought out but never take into account the company’s ability to actually capture the data within their software. Goals you can’t measure are worse than no goals at all as they simply set the employee up for failure.

Here is an example goal set that I have used in the past for my Help Desk teams. The percentages simply reflect the weighting each goal has.

Hard Skills

• Personal Customer Service Rating (weight=30%): equal to or greater than 80% satisfaction.
• First Contact Resolution (weight=30%: 70% or better (this percentage will depend on your team’s specific abilities)
• Maintain or Acquire Certifications as defined by job description (weight=15%)
• Knowledge Base Articles weight=25%): Create or update a minimum of 4 articles per month

Soft Skills (all weighted equally)

• Leadership: Ability to lead and direct others
• Work Methods: How they go about doing their work. Covers efficiency, strategic thinking, using available resources
• Teamwork: Interaction with others. team members, department members, customers and vendors.
• Communications: Both written and verbal, formal and casual. Also covers confidentiality
• Business Understanding: How well do they draw correlations between the specific work and the needs of the organization as a whole. How well they understand the needs and work functions of the departments they support.

Whole classes can be taught around the development of goals so admittedly, this is a very condensed conversation on the topic. Use your HR department, your management peers and examples from other industries to develop you team’s goals. By creating quality goals, you are providing a solid anchor for the majority of your team’s management.

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One of the eternal frustrations expressed by customers of all Help Desks is not understanding the technology they rely upon to do their work. This lack of technical knowledge heightens their anxiety when something goes wrong. Anyone who’s taken calls has wished their customers had a bit more understanding of how things worked so the conversations regarding the repairs could be more efficient. Knowledgeable customers are more comfortable with the equipment.

Kulula Airlines out of South Africa has rebranded some of their aircraft with a simple “Airplane 101” theme that is fun and helps their passengers understand the basics of flying.

Apply this to a few desktops in more visible areas and you can accomplish much of the same effect with your users. The simple use of a label machine when deploying a new device can go a long way to easing the customer’s anxiety about how everything works and will speed up your Help Desk calls when you are trying to get them to reseat the network cable.

The new Apple iPad: Like it or hate it, cool name or dumb, useful or not, regardless of your opinions I feel that it’s important to see this move by Apple as a great bit of marketing strategy.

For years, laptop makers have been trying to find the golden egg of tablet design. Nothing has really landed as the benchmark. Size and weight were generally overcome but they still struggle with input. Most notably, handwriting recognition still can’t produce the accuracy required for business. More recently, the e-book has shown consumers that ultra-light tablets can provide useful tools but as shown with the Barnes & Noble Nook, there is a near immediate desire for more functionality.

While the rest of the world struggles with design and development costs and issues, Apple sees the timing as ripe to step in, show the market how it can be done while at the same time, limiting their financial exposure by limiting the need for any truly new development. The iPad is not much more than a XXL iPod Touch. They can run the same OS, nearly all the same apps with little or no modification. Just slap a larger screen on it and boost the battery life and memory. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of the new iWork functionality show up in the iPhone version 4.0 in the near future.

Apple has reduced the cost, provided a familiar platform, with a strong catalog of applications in a ready to go package from the industry leader in cool must have computing devices. Regardless of what the final format turns out to be for usable tablets, the next three years will have all their competitors chasing their model. At least until we get a strong economy where other companies can afford the heavy R&D to produce the next great thing.

There’s a story I’ve heard many times over the years. The short version is that when Native Americans saw a horse for the first time (horses didn’t exist in the Americas until the Spanish brought them over) they called it a “Big Dog” since they didn’t have a specific word for horse.

Whether this is a true story or not I love it for many reasons. First, just imagine yourself coming into close contact with a large creature of which you’ve never even seen a picture. How would you react? Secondly, this story makes a very important point about how human being interpret totally new ideas. They immediately go to what they know and then modify as best as they can. The problem with this stems from the delay in truly understanding the unique parts of the new idea.

Seeing a horse as a dog makes sense. They are tame as the Spaniards had obviously domesticated them. They did work like dogs even pulling the familiar travois. It wouldn’t be until you were around the horse until you understood that it was definitely a different creature that ate grass, didn’t hunt in packs, spooked easily and had a very different mindset.

Now apply this same issue to your latest idea at the office. You understand the details like the Spaniards did. So much so that you may not realize how completely new the idea is to others. When you are explaining a new idea. Give folks time to adjust their paradigm. They need time to figure out just exactly what they are looking at. To help them make the adjustment, give them examples and let them play in their own way with the idea. Once that’s been done, you’ll have much greater success in explaining exactly what you envision can be accomplished with your newest idea.

With the introduction of Google’s new Nexus phone, Google’s been catching some heat for their lack of customer service. In the past, Google’s attitude was that all their tools were in beta or barely out of it, and in the vein of open sourced applications, the user was pretty much on their own for support. There were large forums and a little bit of Google email. For corporate accounts there are third party assistance but Google themselves never really provided a traditional path for consumers to address their needs.

Now as Google enters into the consumer hardware arena they are finding that the customer wants satisfaction that a three day turn around to emails can’t satisfy. It will be interesting to see how Google handles this. I’d love to see just how Google will approach a service desk. They have the budget to do it right. It’s just a question of how long it will take to set it up.