Every business that has in-house or outsourced IT department knows the feeling of frustration when it seems that “tech people” are not doing a good job. We set out to find out why exactly this happens and what the solutions are. The first surprise was the realization that IT departments that are constantly rated as “knowledgeable, efficient and responsive” fared only slightly better than departments rated as “slow to respond and inefficient” when the question of per incident satisfaction came around. The second unusual trend was that the time of the issue resolution between “good” and “bad” departments was substantial. So something else wasn’t accounted for.
It took a little bit of investigation to see that seasoned IT personnel with deep knowledge of problems and solutions has on many occasions failed to provide better experience while interfacing with a person who called for help. The root of the problem was very simple – while they delivered the solutions quickly, these fixes often were incomplete.
For example a new employee has been assigned a workstation that had to be setup by the IT department. The “tech guy” quickly got the new computer setup on the desk, configured with web access, access to local user files, provided the log-on information to the user and then left. The very same day a help request was sent by the new employee asking when the e-mail will be setup on his computer. In a rush to get everything done quickly, technician has missed this very obvious business need, which resulted in a loss of productivity. To make the incident even more frustrating, he did not verify that the user has VPN on the new laptop, which would prevent the employee from accessing e-mail system and company files remotely. Of course all of this was fixed promptly.
It is for reasons similar to these, that itSolace has a strict policy of documentation of all steps taken, checking-in with the user before leaving the premise and of course following our internal procedures for new workstation setups, issue resolution, user account creation, etc.
