IT support, 1st line & 2nd line

[TallPaul_S]

Quick question for the guys in 1st line/service desk roles:

What's your workload like? Been in my job as a service desk bod (in a small team of desktop support guys) for a while now, all phone calls come to my phone first, but as a team we deal with all phone calls (at a guess, around 150 a day split between 5 guys) - I answer around 50 phone calls a day and I look after the mailbox and log all incoming emails, around 50-60 per day. The only 'support' work I do is unlocking accounts and resetting passwords, along with the normal troubleshooting on the phone with idiot staff... the other desktop guys resolve the calls, some stuff gets esculated to infrastructure (3rd line?) but we deal with the majority of the calls. Oh and this is multiple customers, 20+. But probably 75% of the calls are raised by one customer who has probably in the region of a couple of thousand users (and growing all the time - 80 more users last month, another 60 in a month or 2).

Then there's other stuff like answering the door, chasing calls with 3rd parties and other bits here and there.

Just wondering what other people's work load is like, we're a small company and it's not a call centre environment, I've done my time in customer service answering 80+ phone calls a day with 20 calls queueing all day long.

 

[Caged]

I look after the mailbox and log all incoming emails, around 50-60 per day.

Lol if you don't have a ticketing system to do this for you.

 

[Guest2]

When I was on 1st line I averaged 10-15 calls a day. Some very simple, some pretty complex which could take hours / days communicating with multiple teams / people.

I suppose it wasn't strictly 1st line though. Plus on 1st line I had 2nd line rights and access to some systems even 2nd line didn't. When on 2nd line I had access to some 3rd line systems and now I have some access that goes beyond my teammates in 3rd line.

 

[Guest2]

I answer around 50 phone calls a day and I look after the mailbox and log all incoming emails, around 50-60 per day. The only 'support' work I do is unlocking accounts and resetting passwords, along with the normal troubleshooting on the phone with idiot staff...

sounds like you need to look for a different job or try moving to 2nd line

 

[TallPaul_S]

Lol if you don't have a ticketing system to do this for you.

Nope, we do not. our current service desk system sucks balls and we were meant to be moving to a different service desk system which would do this (and a lot more), but talks have ground to a halt as they realise they can't deliver what we need from a service desk system.

The company is awesome and the guys I work with the same, so I have no intention of leaving - and 2 of the desktop guys in my team (including the team leader) started out doing my job, so there's a clear natural progression path - I've been there less than a year at the moment so it's still early days in the job.

Our desktop guys aren't even 2nd line really, they do everything apart from SQL stuff and complex changes to servers/environments. We're a data centre so everything is either software/server or remote support. On the phones I can be talking to an end user with problems logging on one minute then a lead systems engineer talking about AX/SQL databases the next.

My job is essentially logging and flogging but tbh I don't have time for anything else!!

 

[Guest2]

My job is essentially logging and flogging but tbh I don't have time for anything else!!

Personally I would see this as a problem.

We were always given 'development time' on 1st and 2nd line which allowed us to research or go and work for 3rd line teams of our choice. I gained a 6 month secondment on the back of time put in (inside and outside of work) and now a permanent role on 3rd line

 

[Stellios]

What do you have on top of a degree?

I used to work in retail for 8 years whilst at college and uni so have a lot of customer service experience but when I left uni with a Computer Science degree and started applying for 1st line IT jobs the employers were more interested in my ability to handle customers and offer a fluent, pleasant customer service experience.

I have worked 1st/1.5 line for 2.5 years now and am about to be moved to second line (woop woop) but for 1st line you can be taught the technical stuff (obviously its an advantage to know it) but good customer service skills are harder to teach.

Make sure you are putting just as much focus on being able to deliver good customer services as you are on your technical abilities on your CV and in interviews. When you get interviews for 1st line jobs make sure you have examples of good teamwork and also if you are going for callcentre work they will probably ask for examples of you being given targets and how you went about hitting them.

In my line of work I am responsible for around 40 calls per day, usually around 20 emails per day and around 15 follow up calls per day. I am also trainer responsible for training our new guys on the more technical calls they may get. As I am 1.5 line I support 2nd line directly and am responsible for the more technical side of the job alongside supporting 1st line with advice etc.

If you have any questions feel free to fire away. As one of the trainers I work pretty closely with our recruiters and managers so know quite a lot about our recruitment processes.

I work for a company that has over 300,000 employees and is worth over $50 Bn currently so its quite a large company.

 

[Pestilence]

In my previous job as (technically) first line support I dealt with ~ 20 calls a day and about 30 emails, ranging from AD password resets to BackupExec restores, VMWare (VDI) support/resets, VPN support, RSA login support/account setup, Blackberry (BES) issues, desktop and laptop imaging, SCCM software push problems ("I asked for this program and it isn't here... why?"), which means digging into logs and whatnot.

Printer config and troubleshooting, visits to the nearest data center for cataloging, upgrade installation, swaps and fixes, etc.

I was paid pretty well, so pretty much 2nd line wages which aligned with what as I was expected to deal with. The company seemed to skip the "traditional" 1st line altogether, so you called 2nd and then 3rd took care of the actual enterprise engineering.