Call Center Career Profiles (In Focus)

A relatively new area that has emerged in the Call Center is the Help Desk. It's a niche area where you will deal more with corporate users rather than individuals. The nature of the helpdesk support is technical and the person can look forward to a technology career progression from handling field support to server administration or network administration.

Some of the responsibilities of a Help Desk specialist are:

• Ensuring that services are delivered to meet customer business needs and expectations;
• Receiving and responding to customer problems, issues and requests;
• Ensuring proper documentation, notification, escalation, tracking and following up of all incidents;
• Providing first level support to resolve customer incidents; and
• Combining demonstrated technical qualities with customer service.

To meet this end, candidates that apply to Help Desk jobs will generally be required to have a basic degree in computer science. Some work experience will be very helpful, such as in customer support, customer service or even public relations. More often than not, this work will entail night shifts.

Moving upwards, a Help Desk supervisor will have new responsibilities such as:

• Developing and maintaining expert knowledge of customer specific business environment;
• Managing assigned projects and achieving the goals within deadlines;
• Monitoring the effectiveness of vendor support and escalating issues;
• Monitoring internal controls and quality measures on an ongoing basis;
• Developing new technical skills, supervising departmental procedures and incident reports;
• Managing critical processes.

Ultimately, as a Help Desk manager, you become the focal point for all IT customer service activities within the company. Your role will have changed to encompass responsibilities such as:

• Managing Help Desk teams and perhaps external Client Accounts;
• Ensuring adequate service delivery to your clients;
• Monitoring management reports and managing the support organization to ensure that Service Level Agreements and Operational Level Agreements are met;
• Ensuring service improvement and efficient problem management;
• Planning, developing and implementing support strategies.

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