HelpDesk Stories: Virgin Trains
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Another good example why I don't believe in overly automated helpdesks and am not a big fan of Knowledge bases either. Why can't they just have an email address or a very simple webform?Anyway, Kevin tries to do the right thing by letting Virgin know their SSL certificate is out of date, but has to jump through 10 hoops to do it. Businesses tend to forget that their helpdesk is their front door. It's often an initial point of contact with existing or potential customers. Does your helpdesk leave a good impression with your customers or are your customers leaving to write blog postings like his?
Discussion
Thinking about it that wasn't the first time I've ranted about a company like that, and for a similar offence. I've reported incorrect SSL certificates three times now, the first I simply sent and email and within a few minutes of someone reading it they'd fixed the problem and emailed back to say thank you.
The second time I believe I was still able to send an email but it obviously got through to the wrong person because they just told me not to worry about it. Given Internet security these days I didn't take well to being told to ignore such warnings and just hand over my card details, so I took my business elsewhere.
I suspect that with time and effort you can automate a large deal of helpdesks to a reasonable standard, but you need good staff to back the system up. It's the staff who will always irritate far more than automation. Although it might have something to do with bad staff normally hide behind a badly automated system so I'm already losing my patience by the time I speak to someone.
Created by Kevin on 10.25.2004 12:10 pm
No amount of technology or automation can makeup for a bad employee. Alot of times though the helpdesk person simple isn't informed correctly. It's a large organization and they are very inefficient about training people on different issues or even making it easy to find the correct answer when an issue arises which they don't know the answer to. BigCo's need to do a better job of both training and making information available across the frontline employees.
I think your last point has alot to do with it. If you had gotten even a mediocre employee initially and didn't have to fight through the automation I don't think it would be nearly as irritating. It's just that after telling your life story to a form then jumping through a bunch of other hoops your PO'd by the time you get to someone. I think this post by Seth Godin says it all.
Created by Ian Landsman on 10.25.2004 12:10 pm
Thinking about it that wasn't the first time I've ranted about a company like that, and for a similar offence. I've reported incorrect SSL certificates three times now, the first I simply sent and email and within a few minutes of someone reading it they'd fixed the problem and emailed back to say thank you.
The second time I believe I was still able to send an email but it obviously got through to the wrong person because they just told me not to worry about it. Given Internet security these days I didn't take well to being told to ignore such warnings and just hand over my card details, so I took my business elsewhere.
I suspect that with time and effort you can automate a large deal of helpdesks to a reasonable standard, but you need good staff to back the system up. It's the staff who will always irritate far more than automation. Although it might have something to do with bad staff normally hide behind a badly automated system so I'm already losing my patience by the time I speak to someone.
Created by Kevin on 10.25.2004 12:10 pm
No amount of technology or automation can makeup for a bad employee. Alot of times though the helpdesk person simple isn't informed correctly. It's a large organization and they are very inefficient about training people on different issues or even making it easy to find the correct answer when an issue arises which they don't know the answer to. BigCo's need to do a better job of both training and making information available across the frontline employees.
I think your last point has alot to do with it. If you had gotten even a mediocre employee initially and didn't have to fight through the automation I don't think it would be nearly as irritating. It's just that after telling your life story to a form then jumping through a bunch of other hoops your PO'd by the time you get to someone. I think this post by Seth Godin says it all.
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Created by Ian Landsman on 10.25.2004 12:10 pm