Calling The Help Desk Is Popular
from the help... dept
How often do you call the corporate IT help desk? According to a new study from Siemens Business Services (they want your outsourced IT support business, so there’s a bit of a bias) employees spend a ridiculous amount of time asking for help each week — and it’s not always for work-related technology problems. Over one-quarter of users apparently called their corporate IT help desk to get help with personal technology problems. Meanwhile, five percent of white collar workers claim to spend five hours a week chatting with tech support, and 36% say they spend about 30 minutes a week with tech support. Seems like an awful lot of problems to fix, though, you have to wonder how much of that time tech support is spending trying to fix people’s personal tech problems.
Comments on “Calling The Help Desk Is Popular”
Not Just Technical Questions
In the early 90s I manned a technical hotline for a tech provider. 90% of the calls came in for stuff that was in the databooks, and for them we would just open that page and read it to them (everyone knows RTFM). 5% was for stuff that actually took some digging and research by the tech staff.
Then there were 5% that were just “out there” – I think some people were just lonely. One guy called when Stevie Ray Vaughn died and talked about him for about 15 minutes.
No Subject Given
I also had a not brief enough stint in tech support (9 months) and I can tell you that 90% of the problems boil down to ONE FAULTY PART:
The nut behind the keyboard.
Before I saw that job, I used to laugh and scoff at that email-forward-joke about the guy calling WordPerfect tech support about a non-functional copy of WordPerfect not realising that his PC isn’t working because there’s a power outage.
Never again…I’m CERTAIN that really happened, because it happened to ME personally…twice (in the context of the software I was supporting)..and ONE of them was a guy with 2 masters degrees related to Chemical Engineering and when he realized there was a power outage…he tried to blame THAT on our software!
Re: No Subject Given
I have to agree with both of you.
I had a caller giver me hell yesterday.
This is what happened.
Our website went down.
Big time.
Caller calls up and wants to know if there is a problem with the web site. LEGITAMATE question !
I tell her yes, the site is currently experiencing problems and as of yet I do not have an ETA for when the system will be up and functioning properly.
Caller then proceeds to berate me for not being able to email us this question.
I plainly asked her: Ma’am, if the website is down, how would you be able to click on an email link to send us an email ?
Caller realizes how stupid she sounds and then bawls me out for having to use minutes on her cell phone to call us to ask us if the website is down.
@ this point I asked her what message she got when attempting to go to our website.
She YELLS, word for word the message I knew was up on the site that stated: ” We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. If you need to speak with a Representative of XXX please call us toll free @ XXX-XXX-XXXX “
I told her Ma’am, that was your sign & hung up.
What if 5% of all white collar workers *are* the t
I’m in IT and I spend in excess of 80% of my time talking to the helpdesk. Funny how that statistic looks less impressive when you put it in a different light…
Anyway – I have some users who just call the helpdesk because they want to socialize with someone -or- at least that’s the only explanation I can come up with. That would explain why certain users keep asking me “Is this real?” for each and every MyDoom email they receive. They do this even though they’ve been explicitly told repeatedly how to identify the faked message.
Re: No Subject Given
The callers that call help desk and have no real reason for doing so do not realise that their call is then forwarded around to everyone else in the office for laughs.
Help Desk - Half Truths - Outsourcing and More
I found an interesting survey about customer satisfaction and outsourcing. Check out my blog for more – http://www.helpdesknotes.com/2007/07/help_desk_half_truths_outsourc_1.html