Help Desk

Gunther works for the information systems group at a university. The information systems group is responsible for all of the computers and networks in the university and its dormitories.

Gunther is a member of the help desk team that provides technical assistance when people have problems. Because everyone in the university community uses a computer and these tools are so essential to their academic pursuits, a priority has been placed on making sure that all members of the academic community have all the necessary support to keep their systems running. The university also is extensively networked. Every

office, lab, and dorm room has an Ethernet connection to the university's computer network and a telephone connected to the university's telephone network.

The help desk is a telephone number that is answered 24 hours a day by a team of highly trained computer technicians, like Gunther, who can help users troubleshoot their problems.

When the help desk was first established, it was almost immediately overwhelmed with calls.

Gunther and the other help desk team members identified the following problems:

• Despite the fact that each technician had a different area of specialization, calls would be delivered to the different technicians at random. Often it was not until a minute or more into the call that the technician could determine that the problem might be better handled by someone else. At that point the call could be transferred (and the background information repeated), or the technician could take a stab at the caller's problem.

• After a technician had explained how to a fix a problem, callers preferred to stay on the line while they implemented the solution; they didn't want to risk having to explain the problem (and the fix that was recommended) to a different person if the fix didn't work. The result was that calls that should have taken only two or five minutes actually were tying up a technician and a phone line for as much as half an hour.

• Another reason callers wanted to keep their technician on the line was that waiting times were so long that they didn't want to have to call back again if their problem wasn't solved.

The team decided to let Gunther implement a CT solution to eliminate these problems. Here's what he did:

• Gunther began by building a simple database, using an off-the-shelf database product, that would track all the information relevant to every problem report. Every technician's computer has access to this multi-user database, and the appropriate record is

presented whenever one of them takes a new call. All the information is available to them even if they didn't handle the call that generated the record.

• Gunther set up a voice processing system that greeted each caller to the help desk and asked basic questions about the problem. It could associate the call with an existing request from the caller, or could create a new record in the database.

• Gunther set up call-routing software that used the information about each call in the database to queue and then deliver it to the technician who last handled the call (in the case of a repeat call), or to the technician with the correct expertise based on the nature of the problem (if it's a new call or the original technician is not on duty).

• Gunther also set up a simple Web site^2-2 on the university's intranet. The site provides both answers to the most frequently asked questions (to eliminate the need to even talk to a

technician if possible), and also an escalation mechanism if the needed advice cannot be found.

The escalation mechanism is an alternative to the voice processing system for inserting a

request into the call queue. If a particular computer user's problem is such that the web site can still be accessed, he or she can create a new problem report or indicate an existing one, and request a call to his or her location. When the user's turn comes up, the system automatically calls and connects the call to a technician. In this way, calls are queued on a come, first-served basis, but they don't have to tie up phone lines. Web site users also can monitor their position in the queue so they know roughly how long they'll have to wait.

2-2 Web site — A Web site is a collection of Web pages on an Internet World Wide Web server, or on an equivalent intranet server. A Web page is an HTML document accessible to Web browser applications. These applications translate the document and present it on the computer screen in the form of a hypertext display. In this scenario, the HTML document viewed by each client is created dynamically and is specific to a particular request.

In the future, Gunther would like to add support for screen sharing so that a technician can use the network connection to look at a user's screen, speeding the diagnosis and the fix.

By implementing this system, Gunther was able to make the help desk a much more effective resource in the university community. It saved the university from having to hire many more technicians and provided much more efficient service to callers.