Reading four IT helpdesk support and hiring reflection papers (listed below) brought to mind several social issues regarding support that are rarely openly discussed but appear to be true from my own experience. Over and above setting up all the work flow and planning, tracking, and feedback tools for communication and all the myriad processes into the helpdesk and support structures you have to address who you are hiring to do support and what your goals are relative to those employees or consultants.
My recommendation for success is when seeking support engineers is to hire smart, ugly people with social problems, select those from middle class or lower middle class backgrounds who seek approval from others because they will be lifers in the support industry. Select those who may be physically odd but whose motivations are altruistic towards the company and the users. Writing something so harsh and politically incorrect is critical to do when you have solid motivations around it.
Some people who are bright and technical but not as fortunate to be well trained or to have higher levels of self esteem go into the Support industry for a multitude of reasons, not the least is to indulge their technophile passions, and keep their distance from other people while earning a living. They often come from middle class or lower middle class families. Those from upper middle class families often have abuse problems or unresolved self-esteem issues, and tend to be less friendly over the phone or in email. Both sets of people need to earn a living and their needs for social and career development should be integral to the Help Desk or Support managers' view of their staff.
Others find entrance into a technical support job or even customer support services as a stepping stone into development jobs. The structure of the helpdesk and support environment is similar to a development environment, and access to technical goodies is there too, such as the applications, computers, servers, documentation, and other highly technical people from whom they can learn and bounce ideas off, so it is a good career choice in that sense.While working at a large software company as a front line support technician handling anyone who called in on virtually any question, I supported an estimated 18,000 people in a two year time frame, often teaching the users beginner information such as what a menu item was, and that the file menu item was always located in the same place.
When I say we would support anyone, for example I taught an emotional distraught man who had just survived brain surgery how to import a Word document into Aldus Pagemaker over and over again as he sobbed loudly into the phone. I was glad I possessed the emotional fortitude to encourage him and the technical knowledge which made it easy to do. As long as customers had questions and did not swear at me, I answered them; it was not only company but personal policy. Simultaneously I supported accountants seeking to construct complex pivot tables, as well as Disney animation artists working out detailed timing mechanisms for film making, and rocket scientists from Los Altos trying to figure out why their fonts would not display properly in presentations.
So when people say "it isn't rocket science" I always think of that team of rocket scientists telling me that 6 or 7 of the smartest people in the world were in the room and they couldn't figure it out, so if I did, that put me ahead of their team. Of course I figured it out. Immediately I realized that having accomplished that, it was time for me to move on from product support into something else.
The point is I am speaking from experience. My resume reads that I was a technical engineer – it does not address much about what I engineered because I sought to distance myself from being pigeonholed in the support field. As soon as I began diligently looking for a new job within the large software company I worked for, I realized pretty quickly that there was no upward ladder in Support to anything else in the company. In fact if anything the system was unconsciously designed to prevent workers from moving into other groups at the company. Being in support interacting with actual customers was seen as a dirty job that someone had to do, and information collected from customers regarding their needs and wants had no real path for communication. There was no commitment from the company for support technicians or for the information they gathered.
Right about this time three events occurred that changed the way I thought, or you could say, reinforced what I was thinking. First the CEO visited, second we got a new Unit manager, and third - a random phone call from a development manager came in asking questions the company was not answering.
The CEO of the company came to make a rare visit to the Support unit, and he actually supported a DOS user over the phone. The end user was of course completely surprised and was handled the same way as anyone this famous executive dealt with, directly without pulling punches. On his way off to another meeting the CEO stopped and took a few questions. I asked him if he'd be building a new building to house the support staff now or in the future. At least he was honest- he thought about it for a few seconds and said, no, Support would never be housed on the main campus.
At about the same time a new manager was placed in charge of the unit, and not someone hired from within or promoted. This new unit support manager was female, which in a department where the men outnumbered woman 11 to 1 was very rare. Unfortunately we soon realized she had both things we did not need and want – she was technically incompetent and had severe emotional problems.
As a mentor I was often called in to resolve both software and hardware problems. She selected my co-worker and I to support problems she was encountering with her Macintosh, which even then was pretty easy to use. When we began troubleshooting the network issues she appeared in the doorway and bellowed "Don't touch my mouse!" and demanded answers from us on enough questions which lead us to understand she probably had never worked with any computer before, MacOS or WindowsOS. Worse yet, she was unsophisticated in working with people. I crawled out from under her desk and began searching the company for another job and as swiftly as possible.
Then, staying after work one night, I received a call from a development manager on the East Coast who was randomly dialing into the large software company's phone extensions and got mine. She asked me what the company's plans were because they kept investing in doing some thing, learning to code against some software just to be surprised by the large software company's direction, and also by the lack of communication. Immediately I realized that the lack of communication in our department with customers extended to developers and I knew the company had a problem - one that I could help fix.
All of these things, combined with the rocket scientist’s calls caused me to diligently seek a new job within the cutting edge firm – I had successfully graduated from support and moved into development documentation and communication.
Occasionally, now 20 years later, I run into people that I worked with in support and they still work there. Not the pretty ones, not the ones from excellent families with money, or that have an inkling about business, not those with all or straight teeth, but those oddly devoted people with hearts of gold who may be less than handsome characters but they actually care about users. I think that company is very lucky to have such loyal staff. They have jobs they are very competent at, even if repetitive, and where their rewards come in small incremental doses each time they help a member of the unwashed public figure out how to do something with software or at least why it won't.
The ladders for social development and growth are still individual in Helpdesk and Support – you have to help yourself to success or movement on the ladder – when you are ripe, you leave and find another job – Support will never help employees do that itself, because the need is great, the status low, and the need for support never ends. That's why it has been outsourced to developing countries, because as we know everyone is beautiful in this American paradise.
IT Help Desk
Clarke, S. and Greaves, A. (2002). "IT Help Desk Implementation: The Case of an International Airline." In Annals of Cases on Information Technology, 4, pp. 241-259.
Walko, D. 1999. "Implementing a 24-Hour Help Desk at the University of Pittsburgh." In Proceedings of the 27th Annual ACM SIGUCCS Conference on User Services: Mile High Expectations ( Denver, Colorado, United States). SIGUCCS '99. ACM Press, New York, NY, pp. 202-207.
Duhart, T., Monaghan, P., and Aldrich, T. 1999. "Creating the Customer Service Team: An Ongoing Process." In Proceedings of the 27th Annual ACM SIGUCCS Conference on User Services: Mile High Expectations (Denver, Colorado, United States). SIGUCCS '99. ACM Press, New York, NY, 51-55. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/337043.337090.
Padeletti, A., Coltrane, B., and Kline, R. 2005. "Customer service: help for the help desk." In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM SIGUCCS Conference on User Services (Monterey, CA, USA, November 06 - 09, 2005). SIGUCCS '05. ACM Press, New York, NY, 299-304. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1099435.1099504
List from Lee Dirks IMT520b, Week 5: Modalities of Information Delivery, iSchool, University of Washington, Seattle Spring 2007
3 comments:
Good piece, Linda. I think you have called out some important issues here, and ones that aren't often discussed in the work world. The bell curve doesn't stop at humans, and there are definitely niches that accommodate some parts of that curve better than others. No reason to downplay their importance or value because of that, though that's often the outcome.
No place to go? That's due to the fact that you're delusional about your intelligence and the IQ required to do support. It's a low end job. Talking about rocket science and somehow comparing yourself? Give me a break and get a clue.
Ah... so anonymous, hiding, you have never done support, we see.
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