The retail flood is underway and from early reports, it looks to be a busy one for retailers. This is good news across the board for everyone as the economic recovery needs this as bad as your local retailer does. Sadly, too often, the Help Desk industry doesn’t understand the direct impact they have on the success of the businesses they support. Black Friday is named as such because it’s often the first day of the year that retailers are in the black! Stop for a minute to think of that…47 weeks into the year and it’s the first time your business makes a profit.

Now, if you are going to do nearly 50% of your annual sales in the next 5 weeks, you are working at a very different pace than the rest of the year. To this end, the Help Desk needs to be proactive to this rush instead of reactive. The inability to properly support this kind of work load could literally break your budget.

Things you should already be doing:

• Code Freeze from November 15th through the middle of January. No system updates or new applications may be implemented unless it is to expressly fix an incident.
• Proactive repair: Have your stores order extra toner. If you are under a service contract, have the techs perform a PM on the machines in preparation. You get your brakes fixed before a long road trip, do the same with your registers and printers.
• Fast tracking the top ten fixes. Whatever your top calls are, you need to make sure they get a police escort through your Incident Management System.
• Root Cause: While root cause analysis is very important, returning your customers to a functional state is far more important. If you can implement the fix, do it first. Only continue troubleshooting if the store staff truly has time (and no, they won’t).
• Break a few Rules. Your stores are running all 5 registers all the time during the holidays. If one goes down, that’s a 20% decrease in their capability to take money. Fed-X overnight a new register is a cost you can’t afford to NOT spend.
• Staff Up and Staff Out: Your call volume will increase, get your contractors in place before the rush so they are trained. In some places, it even makes sense to send your Help Desk staff out to the site so that they can work the repairs while the staff handles the rush of customers.

Remember, in the retail world the Help Desk is a cost center, not a profit center. Stay humble and support those departments that are making the money to pay your salary!

And, in January when it’s all over, sit back, relax and celebrate a job well done.

I love words. I love how they can describe wonderful detail and grand ideas. I love how there can be as many interpretations as there are readers, or in the case of speech, listeners. One of my favorite examples of interpretations in the Help Desk world came back in the day of the conversion to to Windows NT and the alphabetical naming of drives on the servers. Much discussion was had about which letter was best used for the common share and what was best for user directories (“O” and “X” respectively). Fairly early on, a rather frustrated customer became offended by the caustic description of a specific drive used by one of the support staff. Emails flamed around and in the end, after much ballyhoo, it was discovered that the tech was describing the “F” and “G” drives but the customer had heard “The Effin’ G Drive”.

“No need to swear at me young man!”

In the perpetual crush of issues that is Help Desk management, it is easy to forget to pay attention to what you are saying and how it may be interpreted. Each contact to your team is an opportunity for misinterpretation. We are already hindered by the need to use a technical glossary of terms unfamiliar to our customers but to add in the normal misunderstandings due to poor enunciation, speaking too fast, and the big one, assumed knowledge is a train wreck just waiting to happen.

Since we can’t avoid them all, it becomes vital that as a manager, we understand the what was said along with the actual incident. In most cases, the confusion comes from not clearly understanding what is being said.

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.