Working on Helpdesk query – tech answers calls or an operator?

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

I used to work in an ordinary office job and when I contacted the company’s IT helpdesk, I’d explain the problem to an operator who would pass on the query to an IT tech, rather than the tech answering the call. When working on a helpdesk, which of these is the more common, the tech answering the calls or an operator?

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

I can't say which is more common but it can depend on the size of the company/contract.

- small company, everyone maybe/gets involved with helpdesk work
- large company, like mine, 1st line techs and so require a 40% firt-time-fix rate, the new contract is 65% rate (some of these are also "operators" as they can only follow a script and have no understanding of what to do/say next).

 

I'm on 1st Line Support and we support over 10,000 Desktops and 2,000 Laptos. Not sure how many Users in total.

So in our Helpdesk (the same with all the others) its the techs answering the phone.

We have a 70% plus first time rate fix. I personnally have an 84% first time fix rate, which isnt bad considering I'm not able to do Remote Assistance as I'm awaiting clearance.

 

I do a mix of 1st and 2nd for 400 people in an accountancy firm.

We have an IT admin who takes care of answering helpdesk calls, allocating email requests that come in to the helpdesk, logging tickets to me and other techs, purchase orders, filing, managing licencing etc.

I will answer the phone if she's already on the phone, or out to lunch, but generally I am not expected to answer it.

There's a nice clear line between tech and non-tech duties here, which I love.

 

As for me... I work in a team of three. One IT Manager (who spends most of his time on the phone to other companies) and another 'IT Assistant' such as myself.

Most of the issues logged come in either phone/email/face-to-face form and we're expected to deal with them swiftly and directly. We generally don't have any SLAs or anything like that, we just fix what we can (which is 95% of all issues) or pass it on to a support company to deal with directly - we're on-ste contacts for said companies.

We also log all of the issues raised so that we have a clear timeline of how many issues we clear per day/general trends etc.

I guess it's one of the joys of having a vauge job title - 'IT Assistant' - fixes all.

 

As Above

 

At places where I've done in-house support, the techs answer calls (and e-mails) directly. At the last place I worked, the help desk coordinator would receive the majority of the calls and enter the tickets. That said, I wasn't immune from receiving calls, particularly if the employee knew that I was the one who should handle the problem.

At places where I've done contract work for customers, an office staff member would usually take a message and then let us know which of our customers needed a callback. If it was one of my regular clients, I'd sometimes get the call directly.

 

I know that in my present work if we have a fault with any of the diagnostic equipment, I call a Siemens helpdesk in Germany and they just have a logger who speaks the lingo, takes down basic fault description and contact details, assigns a request number and passes it on to a tech who then calls back.