Running an Effective Help Desk, 2nd Edition at Dominant Systems Book Store

Czegel covers all aspects of help-desk design and implementation: staffing, training, evaluation, problem resolution, tracking, marketing, and outsourcing. She covers traditional help desks with telephones and the new help desk on the Internet. Aimed at business managers and information technology departments supporting commercial products, this book will work for general circulating collections that support businesspeople as well as corporate collections. There is also a close fit between the business help desk and the public library reference desk that is providing service for walk-up patrons, voice and FAX phone access, and information via E-mail and the web; as such, this may be useful for libraries considering expanding reference access.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews & Comments
This thorough book provides a clear roadmap to designing, implementing and operating a help desk. The author leaves no key process out and completely covers everything from initial concept to measuring support effectiveness and process improvement. Ms. Czgel starts with an initial strategy that is focused on planning help desk services that are completely aligned to requirements and are based on a mission statement. This business-oriented approach is refreshing and will keep IT grounded in the real reasons for a help desk. More importantly, in my opinion, is the process that she proposes for careful selection of services to provide. My experience has shown that an overly ambitious set of service goals will kill a help desk implementation early in its life by offering a too much before there is a stable help desk process in place. As such, Ms. Czgel's approach is realistic and lays the foundation for a success implementation. I especially liked the use of customer profiles and the emphasis on roles and responsibilities early in the planning process. The section on the actual design of the help desk structure provides insights and information that can be applied to a large number of solutions. Since help desks will be organized in accordance with requirements and unique mission statements, this section of the book is like a catalog of patterns. I liked the excellent tips on how to best structure the help desk to meet requirements and mission. The information on accurately estimating staffing requirements is consistent with industry best practices and something that, believe it or not, is often overlooked when help desks are established. I also found the chapter on consolidating help desks valuable because this is a common project that many companies face. The advice given is sound and well thought out. Since my job is service delivery consulting this entire section was particularly valuable. Part three of the book gets into the meat by thoroughly covering the processes that are essential to running a help desk. Most of this material is not new or much different from what other help desk books provide, but there were a few topics that stood out as both unique [to books of this genre] and reflect best practices by the best-run help desks. Examples are change control, disaster recovery and vendor management. These topics show that the author not only considers business alignment, but also cross-functional alignment within IT. Professional resources and underlying technology are provided in part four. In the first chapters the author points out sources of standards, best practices and other support, such as the Help Desk Institute, Software Support Professionals Association, etc. In the final chapters she provides a clear explanation of how technologies such as ACDs (automatic call distributors) and IVRs (interactive voice response) equipment work and how they can provide additional efficiencies to a well-run help desk operation. The author also provides good coverage of tools and techniques that will make help desk operations responsive to user needs as well as support internal IT processes and procedures. This book wraps up with an in-depth coverage of operational requirements for the help desk once it has been implemented. It hits all of the critical success factors, such as performance metrics, service level agreements, communications and internal evaluations. I particularly liked the chapter on marketing, which is something that is important but not often done be most help desks. This proactive approach to keeping users (your customers) informed of new services, accomplishments and tips is excellent and will go a long way towards attaining high customer satisfaction scores - not to mention proving the value of the help desk to IT and business management. As a service delivery consultant I found this book to be one of the best for planning and implementing a world-class help desk. I personally gained a lot of knowledge from it, and it reinforced some of my past experiences and accomplishments. It earns 5 stars and my highest recommendation.

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