A week in the life of the Help Desk Team
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Community IT Help Desk
Ever wonder what it takes to be a help desk analyst, or what our help desk does in a typical week?
We’re inordinately proud of our help desk team, the first and usually only point of contact for most staff for most clients.
Listen to this presentation on a typical week and learn about the teamwork, expertise, and continual learning that goes into providing excellent IT support service.
“You all do such an amazing job, with such great positive energy, and we always get such great feedback from our clients about the service they receive from the help desk.
Johan Hammerstrom, CEO
It’s really, it’s so critical to all of the work that we do.
So I just want to thank each one of you for all your hard work and your diligence.”
Presenters
In addition to the Help Desk Team, you will hear from Carolyn Woodard (introduction) and CEO Johan Hammerstrom (closing.)
Ready to get strategic about your IT?
Community IT has been serving nonprofits exclusively for twenty years. We offer Managed IT support services for nonprofits that want to outsource all or part of their IT support and hosted services. For a fixed monthly fee, we provide unlimited remote and on-site help desk support, proactive network management, and ongoing IT planning from a dedicated team of experts in nonprofit-focused IT. And our clients benefit from our IT Business Managers team who will work with you to plan your IT investments and technology roadmap if you don’t have an in-house IT Director. Our Community IT Help Desk is one of the cornerstones of our services to nonprofits.
We constantly research and evaluate new technology to ensure that you get cutting-edge solutions that are tailored to your organization, using standard industry tech tools that don’t lock you into a single vendor or consultant. And we don’t treat any aspect of nonprofit IT as if it is too complicated for you to understand.
We think your IT vendor should be able to explain everything without jargon or lingo. If you can’t understand your IT management strategy to your own satisfaction, keep asking your questions until you find an outsourced IT provider who will partner with you for well-managed IT.
If you’re ready to gain peace of mind about your IT support, let’s talk.
Transcript
Carolyn Woodard: Welcome to the Community IT Innovators Technology Topics podcast. I’m your host, Carolyn Woodard, and today we’re going to learn about a week in the life of the Help Desk at Community IT.
This was a presentation recently given to our staff, and I hope you’ll enjoy this presentation and get to know a little bit more about the people that are so helpful and are the first point of contact for most of our clients. And they work very hard to resolve the issues quickly and with a lot of friendliness, and to use their knowledge and expertise to help our clients get moving again quickly.
You’re going to hear from Nitcha Thanasit, who is the Help Desk Manager. One of the good things about Community IT is that the Help Desk is where many of our technicians have started out. We do a lot of promotion from within, and you’ll hear many of the Help Desk members talk about the studying hour that they do to improve their skills to help our clients. As people become more and more proficient, they are often promoted into taking the escalations instead of referring those escalations to the engineers.
You’ll also hear them talk about the ITBM. This is the IT Business Manager. It’s a special position within Community IT. It’s kind of like an account manager, but so much more. Our ITBMs have the technical experience and background and certifications, but they also have business experience and background.
They are a main point of contact for our clients. And they are able to take a holistic look at the systems and processes. They get to know their clients very well. They can make suggestions. They work in partnership with the clients.
For example, if the Help Desk is finding that they’re running into the same problem over and over, the ITBM may be able to make a suggestion, for example, purchasing new laptops, if certain laptops are giving a lot of, causing a lot of calls to the help desk. So those are ways that the ITBM is partnering with our clients to save them money, help them budget for upgrades.
And it’s our role to really understand what’s available and serve as a reference and a trusted partner to make recommendations for our clients. That POC is the point of contact. Usually, it’s an executive at the client that is responsible for all of the IT that they have outsourced. They’re responsible for policies, procedures, training the staff, and we partner with them to do those things.
So, I hope you’ll enjoy this presentation. Get to know a little bit more about our help desk and all of the things, the many wonderful things that they do.
Nitcha Thanasit: I’m so proud to present our team here. Start from myself, Nisha Thanasit. I’m based in DC.
So now let’s see the adventures of a week at the help desk. How does it look like? This is the agenda for today. We’re going to talk about the purpose of the team, meet the team, and the help desk team schedules, and weekly highlights that each member is going to walk you through that.
The purpose is always nice to remind everyone. This is our purpose of the team, to
Resolve client incidents and restore services as quickly as possible.
Fulfill client service requests,
Provide excellent customer service to our clients.
And yes, and who are in our team?
Deshawn Alton based in Maryland, Rivel Koulle based in Maryland, Mason Singh from ITBD based in India, Ian Lash based in Florida, Kayla Servance based in Virginia, Daniel Pair based in Alabama, Sally Urbana from ITBD based in India, and Charles Jha from ITBD based in India.
And this is what our work schedules look like, covering from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern Time Zone, Monday through Friday. We provide three supporting channels via chat, a call, or an email.
And now we’re going to see how our week is going to look like. So, let’s start from Monday.
Daniel Pair: All right. Hello, everyone. It’s Monday morning, 8 a.m. I begin the day by saying good morning to Daeshawn, logging in to all of our applications, and checking the Help Desk Board and Hot Board for any emergency tickets. I also check and confirm that the managers for the Help Desk and Hot Boards have been updated automatically.
This morning, I found a ticket that was submitted from a user requesting assistance with resetting their password. We consider these kinds of requests urgent, so I go ahead and assign myself to work on it immediately.
However, the ticket was submitted from the user’s personal email account, and because of this, the ticket’s not yet authorized. And because this request involves restoring account access, we must make sure to validate the identity of the person making the request to prevent any potential account compromise. With it being before 9 o’clock a.m., most of the point of contacts and security authorizers have not started work for the day and are not available yet. I check with this user and confirm that they still have access to their work email and their phone and are able to authenticate the request that way.
Once I have taken care of all the emergency tickets, I then assign or send a scheduling link for any remaining tickets. And it is now 9 o’clock a.m., so I send a quick good morning to the rest of our team that’s starting their day while I switch to be ready to cover the phones until noon.
Mason Singh: All right. Good afternoon, everyone. So, I start my day by reviewing the tickets and also checking my emails. This involves checking for any updates, responding to any customer inquiries and ensuring that all necessary actions are taken on each ticket.
From 12 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., I provide dedicated phone support to all our customers. Simultaneously, I provide ongoing chat support to our customers through 8 p.m., that is till the end of my shift. This involves actively monitoring and responding to incoming chat requests, addressing user concerns, and providing timely assistance.
When providing chat support, I encountered a user experiencing slow computer performance. I checked for any unwanted software installed, as well as any startup programs that can be disabled. I deleted the cookies and cache as well. Although when troubleshooting the issue, I discovered that this user had reported the problem multiple times in the last one month. Recognizing the recurring nature of this issue and its potential impact on the user’s productivity, I followed the established protocol and escalated this issue as a problem ticket to the asset team for further investigation and resolution.
Thank you.
Daeshawn Aulton: Hi, everybody. So, it’s Tuesday, and I’ve just signed in to cover the phones and the chats. I also said good morning to Daniel, as we do every morning, and then later on, I get a call.
And for this scenario, the Internet connection is down, the network adapter has been disabled, and I start out by gathering information from the client. I get their name and the organization they’re calling from, and I ask, how can I help you? And they say, I can’t see my Wi-Fi or I can’t connect to the Wi-Fi. I only see airplane mode available.
And with this information, I create a ticket and I sign them as the contact, and I start troubleshooting the issue. I want to know, when did this happen? Did they run any updates? Have they switched locations? And they say, yeah, I did update my computer yesterday.
And since I’m not able to connect to the computer remotely, I have to figure out why did this happen. And so, I walk them through using the network troubleshooter to check for errors, and it tells us the network adapter has been disabled.
So now with this information, I’m able to walk them through how to re-enable their network. And they’re super excited to browse the Internet, reconnect to their work-related applications. But I want to make sure that their Windows updates have been fully installed and reboot the computer to make sure that they can connect on their next reboot.
And after that, I ask, is there anything else I can help them with? And they just kind of want to know what happened. And I just explained to them that the updates may have disabled their network adapters, but we were able to turn them back on and ensure that they are connected. And the client agrees, we can close the ticket.
The next call that I get, the Internet connection is down and I’m going to talk about how to escalate this ticket. So, I still begin by gathering information from the client. I get their name, the organization, and most of the time they have a helpful description. In this case, it might be a point of contact calling or someone who can give us more information about the site, whether the power is out or network appliances have been unplugged.
But for this particular scenario, it was the POC (Point of Contact) who called in and was able to remember a check-in they had with their IT Business Manager. And with this information, I’m able to create a ticket and assign them as the contact.
And I also want to share this major incident with the rest of the team in case another staff member calls in about the same issue.
After that, I log in and I can begin to live escalate this ticket and share it with the advanced support engineers. And so, the live escalation is going to include the client information, the name, service ticket number. It is going to include that the Internet is down for the entire site.
Following that, I can go ahead and escalate the ticket. I can provide more information through the internal notes for ASET (Advanced Support Engineering Team.) I can send a client notification email to the point of contact, and then I can unassign myself, change the priority, and follow up on the resolution.
And now it’s time for my break.
Rivel Koulle: All right. So, it’s just the afternoon. I process computer setups following our documented procedures. Most of the computer setups go to Mustafa Hamidi (Network Administrator.) Computer setups are pretty much straightforward. But sometimes when the request is a little bit tricky, I jump in to help Mustafa with the request.
And also finally, when I do ticket triage, I screen the whole Help Desk board for any misplaced tickets. And so, what I mean by that is I screen for all the active tickets on the Help Desk board. If I see a ticket that is not assigned to anybody, I get the ticket, I read it, and I see what team can better handle the ticket.
So, if it’s the Help Desk that can work on it, I assign it to someone on the Help Desk, or I’ll move it to another team board. And I would say also this is like my main task as the Help Desk Coordinator is to route tickets to each team to see and to process the tickets accordingly.
After I’m done vetting the board and everything looks good on the Help Desk board, I go ahead and work on my requests I assigned to me because yes, I don’t spare myself, also I assign tickets to me.
And then I log in to the call center to help with the incoming calls. And that’s pretty much how my day goes.
Thank you.
Kayla Servance: Hey, everybody. It’s Tuesday and time for our team huddle. I’m joined by my bright-eyed Help Desk team, of course, with big smiles, and we usually start alphabetically.
For 30 minutes, we take our time just to talk about any service tickets or incident tickets we’ve been working on or anything we’d like to share to the group.
After the team huddle, my scenario is I’ve been assigned a security incident where an email account has been compromised. My first step is to check the sign-in logs and device information in Azure portal.
I’ve called the user and verified the same information. I’ve also helped the user reset passwords and update their MFA. I’ve helped them check and rectify any unknown rules in Outlook and check for mass e-mail sent.
In the case of not being able to reach the user, I will reach out to the POC and get authorization to reset the password and disable any rules that the user never created.
At this point, my notes are added and I began escalating the ticket, changing the status to new and the priority as escalation.
After the ticket has been handed off, at this time it’s now 3 PM and it’s time for my studying. For one hour, I’ll be studying my network, the troubleshooting, using learning tools and videos from Professor Messer to broaden my knowledge. Thank you.
Sally Urbana: Hello, everyone. It’s Wednesday today. So, I started my day at 9 AM with a monthly check-in with Nitcha.
After the meeting, a call landed on my 5-9, so I took the call. User said that he is having an issue with Outlook, getting an error, Outlook non-responding.
So here, I would follow the troubleshooting process by identifying the problem and then established a theory of probable cause. Then test the theory to determine the cause. After establishing a plan of action, if I needed to access their computer, I would ask them to close all the sensitive data open and get their consent before access. After that, I would implement the solution and test the functionality.
Thank you.
Ian Lash: Hi, everyone. All right. So, it’s now Wednesday at 2 o’clock.
Sally cannot make her 2 o’clock appointment and asks for help. I respond that I’ll take the ticket.
After reviewing the ticket, I’ll start by checking approval and getting approval if needed to verify user identity. Then I guide them through the process of registering a new device. Everything seems to be working. I’ll then ask them if they have any questions about MFA and how it works or why it is needed. Then I’ll wrap up the call by asking if there’s anything else I can help with.
After that, it’s study time. I’ll use my one-hour time block to study for my AZ-900 exam. During this time, I’m off phones and cannot be booked for client support. This time is crucial to develop a more robust skill set to better support our clients.
It’s now 4.50 and the day is closing for me. It’s time to do my daily time sheets. I’ll check that all my appointments are accounted for as well as meetings and breaks. I want to pay careful attention that the times are correct so that billing is accurate.
Thank you.
Nitcha Thanasit: And Thursday now, as usual, we have the team huddle again every Tuesday and Thursday. We share challenges or updates among the team.
Charles Jha: Hello, everyone. It’s Friday. So happy Friday.
My shift begins at 1 and continues till 9 p.m., during which I focus on my regular responsibilities, taking all and working on my assigned tickets.
We have a Help Desk meeting every last Friday of the month. We invite the engineer team to guide and educate us on a specific topic. Beside this, every second month, we have our Help Desk Virtual Lunch, where we talk about everything but the work. It gives us an opportunity to know each other better.
After five, I take over the ticket triage duties from Rivel. Once this handover is complete, I prioritize tickets by reviewing the Help Desk Service Board and assign them to Mason as we share the after-hours shift. During this process, both Mason and I ensure we are available for calls on 5-9.
While reviewing the board, if I identify that a server has been offline for past 30 minutes, if it requires immediate attention, I attempt to contact the point of contact. If the call goes unanswered, I notify Nitcha. Additionally, I send an official email to the POC copying Nitcha and the ITBM (IT Business Manager) to ensure the proper escalation and documentation. In case they answer the call, I provide all the available information so that they could proceed with the resolution.
At 9 p.m., while wrapping up, I check the on-call engineer. Then after 9, I call our help desk number to check the functionality of the voicemail. I ensure that after hours, handoff email includes all the relevant information, including details of all tickets that I’ve worked on and handoff tickets if applicable. After completing everything with a greeting, happy weekend. I sign off for the day. Thank you, everyone.
Nitcha Thanasit: Thank you. So that’s the weekly highlights of the Help Desk.
Johan Hammerstrom: Thank you, Nitcha, and thank you, everyone on the Help Desk team for that really wonderful presentation. I really enjoyed hearing from each one of you and just learning a little bit more about what a week is like in the life of the Help Desk. And you all do such an amazing job with such great, positive energy, and we always get such great feedback from our clients about the service they receive from the Help Desk.
And it’s really, it’s so critical to all of the work that we do. I just want to thank each one of you for all your hard work and your diligence.
Thank you.
Nitcha Thanasit: Thank you.
Photo by Shridhar Gupta on Unsplash