How to Support High-Tech Users

by Stephanie Faris on Friday, May 26 12:00

Help desk technicians are trained to handle a wide variety of issues, from crashed hard drives to misplaced files to malfunctioning printers. However, today's help desks serve a wide variety of professionals, as businesses have consolidated their support to save money. Staying updated on the latest word processing software while also being able to help with custom-designed applications and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions can be challenging for even the most experienced technician.

In many organizations, help desk workers find that a small group of high-tech users can often provide the biggest headaches. These teams may work as engineers, applications developers, data analysts, or in some other technical field that requires specialized knowledge. As technicians scramble to learn enough to advise them, these end users can get frustrated and see it as bad customer service. Here are a few ways your help desk can improve the support they're giving to high-tech users.

Get to Know the Team

From the end user's perspective, frustration begins to form after months of dealing with technicians who fail to help them. They may spend hours waiting for technicians to research an issue, only to find it's never solved. They may even eventually solve the problem themselves out of frustration with the wait. If your help desk makes a concerted effort to get to know technical staff and the platforms they use to do their jobs, you'll likely find they're much more patient when resolving an issue takes time. One way to make things easier for everyone involved is to send one or more of your team members through training on the specialized solutions these employees use and make them the expert in that area.

Create a Knowledgebase

If you don't already have a knowledgebase, you're likely wasting time on a regular basis. Instead of constantly reinventing the wheel, a knowledgebase will allow your team to enter solutions to issues when they resolve them. When that issue occurs again, other help desk members can pull up the resolution and follow the instructions entered by the previous technician. Work with your help desk software provider to make it easy as possible to enter solutions before resolving tickets and enforce a policy that ensures technicians use it.

Lock Systems Down

Unfortunately, too often technical employees need help because they're doing things they shouldn't be. This is usually unauthorized software downloads or navigating to dangerous websites. While this behavior isn't limited to high-tech workers, they are more likely to feel comfortable with these activities, where less technical employees would hesitate. Make sure your systems are locked down using a least-privilege administrative model, which means that your workers have only the access necessary to do their jobs. If they need more access, they can request it and have it added later.

Your high-tech users are an important part of your organization, but supporting them can be complex. With just a few extra steps, you can make sure your technicians have the tools necessary to provide that support, which will in turn impress your end users with your attention to customer service.