IT Service Desk advice please

SexyGreyFox

SexyGreyFox

SexyGreyFox

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Joined
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I've got a mate who is applying for an IT Service Desk role at a company with around 150 PCs.
All the PCs are networked, have networked printers and have different shared drives.
He is quite savvy with this kind of stuff and I can only help him so far but it would be great to see what the experts would do and say.
Below I have some examples and all of the stuff I would say and would be valid but I may have them in the wrong order.
Obviously depending on the answer it will take you in another direction before you take it to the next level -

Example 1 -
Customer - "I can't get the printer to work"
Service Desk -
When did you last use the printer?
Can anybody else use the printer?
Can you get an internet/intranet connection?
Have you got access to your shared drive?
On your PC desktop are some numbers, can you read back the one that says IP Address by it? (I'm assuming that they may work like our NHS PCs).
I now need to check if your printer driver is installed.
Go down to your taskbar and look for your little printer icon and delete any jobs and start again.


Example 2 -
Customer - "I can't use my email"
Service Desk -
When did it last work?
Can your colleagues use their email?
Can you get an internet/intranet connection?
Have you got access to your shared drive?
On your PC desktop are some numbers, can you read back the one that says IP Address by it? (I'm assuming that they may work like our NHS PCs).
Have you tried re-booting your PC?
I now need you to check in your email software if you have got an account setup.


There's 2 to go on with.
Thanks
 
tbh with those printer ones the first thing I'd ask is what happens when you press print.
this can often give you a very good launch point for fixing the issue.

what I would say is that the way you question the user is less of an issue than your manner in general and call logging skills. they will want him to write down whatever he thinks is relevent.
MUST INCLUDE
Users name
PC Reference
Contact number
Details of fault

as a fellow NHS IT bod, I've been wondering, do they use Visual QSM everywhere or do you have another call logging system up there in stoke?
 
Customer: The wireless isn't working since the new server install at my company!!! Now my home laptop can't connect to the wireless

Service desk: -Can you see the wireless network?
-Is anyone else connected to the network?
-When was it last working?
-When you click the connect button on the detected wireless network (The one you wish to join) does it ask for a passkey of some sort?
-If you know this passkey, does it then allow you to connect to the internet?
-If this fails to work, and the user is adament that the passkey is correct, get users younger son / more computer savvy friend to input the code.
-Now the internet should be working

^^^ True story ;)
 
dmpoole said:
(I'm assuming that they may work like our NHS PCs).

Thanks
Click to expand...

Don't. Although major organisations have the ability to control the desktop wallpaper and put all sorts of useful information on there, a small company with 150 PCs is highly unlikely to be this organised.

For a Service Desk job its' more likely to be about telephone manner etc than the technical ability. I'd be looking for someone with basic IT skills (as your friend seems to have) and then hammer home the customer service aspect - the SD is the first port of call for most of the users and you need to remember that most of them are terrified of technology/idiotic/ignorant/think they know more than you etc. 1st line support is an exercise in patience if nothing else.
 
Are you trying to coach him?
I doubt those are the type of questions he's likely to see in an interview.
 
Goliath said:
Don't. Although major organisations have the ability to control the desktop wallpaper and put all sorts of useful information on there, a small company with 150 PCs is highly unlikely to be this organised.
Click to expand...
You should see my infrastructure :D

100~ users, certainly a more secure environment (in both physical network infrastructure and active directory implementation) than most of the large organizations I've worked for.

You also have to take into account that 150 PC's doesn't necessarily mean a smaller business. I've been employed in situations where the company is multinational with 1000's of employees, but due to the nature of the business there were only a few hundred PC users. As a result the IT budget was still high, and the infrastructure properly implemented.

This is why I asked who the company was.
 
Last edited:
paradigm said:
You should see my infrastructure :D

100~ users, certainly a more secure environment (in both physical network infrastructure and active directory implementation) than most of the large organizations I've worked for.

You also have to take into account that 150 PC's doesn't necessarily mean a smaller business. I've been employed in situations where the company is multinational with 1000's of employees, but due to the nature of the business there were only a few hundred PC users. As a result the IT budget was still high, and the infrastructure properly implemented.

This is why I asked who the company was.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but you're good at your job :p I've done consultancy across large and small, and it's rare to have a properly locked down infrastructure whatever the size - it's the exception rather than the rule.

O/T (and apologies for the thread hijack) but where you at these days Elliot?
 
s0ck said:
Are you trying to coach him?
I doubt those are the type of questions he's likely to see in an interview.
Click to expand...

No, I'm not trying to coach him but pass on some good advice from those in the role and that's why I came on here.
I can give him help with his CV and interview skills but how an IT Service desk is beyond my remit.
I rang one of my mates up in NHS IT and he said they give a test interview over the phone and those are the type of questions they ask.
They also do a scenario test of 'Where would you send the technician and what would you say to the other priority call?'.
Of course this is a different place so things are probably different.
 
dmpoole said:
No, I'm not trying to coach him but pass on some good advice from those in the role and that's why I came on here.
Click to expand...

Asking the user to do a full reboot is a quick and reliable way of getting round a lot of otherwise illogical problems. In my days of IT support I'd have tended to ask the caller to restart their PC before checking if printer drivers were installed, reinstalling software etc.

In an interview situation it might come across as a non-technical solution, but several years of experience tells me that it's an extremely practical no-lose way to resolve a question.

However, from memory, the scenarios you encounter in basic IT interviews tend to come down to cables being unplugged or the printer running out of paper, neither of which could be resolved by a reboot :)

If he's going for a fairly technical role in a medium-to-large business network he should have learned how to logically approach a problem while learning his trade. If it's a basic frontline role, the scenarios won't be 'how would you fix this BSOD', they'll be easy problems to separate the muppets from the potential employees.
 
Well i work for the Bradford NHS IT service desk and i can say with the staff we have in a lot of it is telephone manour, although we do employee a few technically minded people the most just need to know how to take down an error message and simple details as the above states, User name of called, site, S/T or serial # of PC Ip address and a simple desciption of the fault.
Now if your mate has a good bit of knowlege behind him and good people skills he should sail into the job!
 
Number 1 priority for any service desk employee is detail. Names, times, descriptions of faults, where the user sits, PC ID marks, when it last worked etc etc. Always give the impression that you know what your doing and that something is being done to resolve their problem, even if all you can do is chase a supplier for a part that is out of stock. Tell them what your doing for them and above all be honest. If you don't know when its going to be fixed say that, don't bull**** them with some fobb-off answer to get them off your back. It's your job to manage expectations and deliver a certain level of professionalism.

Technical skill can be learned, customer service skills and attention to detail often can't. I will take the IT literate but non-techy with customer service phone experience over the techy nerd any day of the week to join my team.

This is coming from 3 years as a Service Desk lead.
 
The way our Service desk/ICT support works for my company is the following:

We have 2 people on service desk who answer calls and emails from employees and external customers. The calls are logged into ICCM service desk control and are assigned to any of the 3 of us on the ICT support team.

The calls are assigned based on what subject the fault is for example:
Desktop/Hardware/Software/VPN/Printers - Me
MOSS/Blackberry/Desktop/Orders - Adam
Networking/Desktop-Ryan

Calls logged are given priority(Usually we just go down the list and fix what we can :P) and have an SLA clock running on each call which can be stopped at anytime. Calls are then seen to either by remote control/instructions over telephone or visit the user who logged the fault.

The service desk is basically our 1st line support (When it comes to external customers its service desk who deal with it) who receives all the grief from users compaining that something is running slowly/not working then passes it onto us IT bods.
 
With the printer one, first thing i would be expecting would be "Is it turned on, and if so, are there any error lights, such as out of paper" :D

As Dureth (and others) says for the rest pretty much. Some of the best people i have put in Service Desk roles have been non-IT people, McDonalds staff, people from retail shops, i.e. people used to dealing with the public and knowing how to manage expectations and also have the ability to deal calmly with oft-times irate users.

May be worth getting him to browse through some ITIL bits on the net to do with Service Desk so that he gets to understand the terminology. A question sometimes asked along your lines may be 'You need to install x, how would you do it if you werent sure?', the first response would be 'Is there a set procedure for that, if not, i would ask a more experienced colleague for assistance making sure i noted down what i was doing for future reference'.

VeNT, we used to use QSM (replaced ICCM) but binned it and now use BMC Remedy 7.
 
ICCM was fine, but we had developed it heavily in house and would have meant relying on 1 developer who already had an inflated opinion of himself. He was adamant that we werent going to change how it worked when we set up a new service desk (previously it had been a 2 person helpdesk, moving to a 12 person service desk), so we went out and found a new supplier, QSM who were willing to let us lease the product rather than having to buy it, meant less for set-up costs for the desk, so it looked more attractive financially to the bean counters.

Moved from QSM to Remedy 6 when we merged with another department, then had an upgrade to 7 last year. Remedy is a great tool, very feature rich, but it takes a big investment to get there and can probably be done cheaper with other tools to equal effect.

I did like ICCM and the workflow style approach to development, very easy tool to use and wouldn't say i would never look at them again if i was in the market for a replacement product in the future.
 
We had QSM running in one place and Remedy in the other. Comparing them side by side it was clear that Remedy was the more 'complete' product even though it was dearer. That plus our LSP utilises it so we can integrate quite easily with their service desk made it a no brainer.
 
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