Help Desk and Support Organizations

As you grow another area that will need to grow is your support services. In some situations your ability to support your customers, whether they be students or paying clients, will determine how well and how painlessly you can grow your infrastructure. Some of you may already be dealing with the issue of supporting your users; others of you may just be starting. I hope that I can give you some ideas and directions to try as you go through this process.

Typical Scenario – You the Technician Answer the Questions – This Does Not Scale Well

If you are trying to build your network, your business, or just keep things running and you plan on growing, then providing user support will make this difficult unless you plan for this first. If you are trying to build and maintain your network, your systems, and your own internal client machines, then having to answer user questions can be anywhere from time consuming, frustrating, or might even keep you from getting work done that is critical. On the other hand, if you like answering and helping users with their problems, then maybe you will be interested in helping with your internal support organization. In either case, somebody is going to have to do this job.

Getting Started – What Are Some of the First Questions to Answer?

First and foremost, are you going to offer support? What happens if you don’t offer support? Is this an option, or are the users going to come to you regardless of what you try and do? If you are a business this is probably not an option at all. If you are a university, then you may have more options. But, remember, if you offer poor support, then your users will likely use your networks and systems poorly.OK, so you are going to offer some support. What do you want to support, or what do you need to support? Figure out what it is that you are doing and then plan to answer questions in these areas. Very typically you have people who are trying to dial in, or trying to connect to the network locally. These people need help with the following areas (and more!):

Scalability

As you create your Help Desk use methods that scale. Perhaps you can deal with the 100 or 200 users who may dial in this year with just 1 or 2 staff members, but what happens if this number becomes 500 or a 1000? Even harder, what if you still only have a few staff members when this number of users come to you for help? There are ways to deal with these numbers and I’ll present some of these, and some in detail, this week.

Don’t become fixated on one way of doing something. Sometimes a method that seems ridiculous at first will become an invaluable tool to your group.

Maybe you can do something that is really wonderful, looks great, etc., but which doesn’t really offer much more functionality than some other solution that is very simplistic. A typical example of this is the creation of a CD-ROM. Perhaps you can create a beautiful interface with a product like Macromedia’s Director, but then how many people can use this? And, what if all you want to do is give people an installer and some instructions for dialing in. Perhaps a Web page that autoplays when the CD is inserted and an installer is all you really need and it gets the job done just as well.

Another example of this comes with disk installations vs. CD-ROMs. Perhaps you can create a CD-ROM and let several hundred people use it. And, perhaps, just a few people don’t have CD-ROM drives. Should you create disk sets for these people? Is it worth it? This is a decision you’ll need to make. Probably the number of disks needed will determine whether you’ll do this. But, if you are going to spend an entire day (or more) making disks for just a couple of people, then this may not be worth your while.

I can guarantee this. If you fix a problem by putting together a solution that will fail the next time user upgrades their software, their operating system, or anything else, then you will be seeing that user again. Even worse, what if you aren’t around. Then, one of your colleagues must figure out what you did before they can fix anything. This can waste a lot of time. If a quick fix can’t be avoided, be sure that you document it well.

Starting from Scratch

I assume that people are doing anything from responding to help requests as they come in without any planning of this process to already using a well-formed system of help requests and responses. Even with a system in place, however, the aim of this document is to give you some ideas that you might be able to apply to your organization to improve the way you do client support.

At some point, even if it is painful, it is worth it to sit down and plan out how you want to do support. Perhaps you are already supporting a large number of people, but you have never discussed or planned how you should be doing this. If you take some proactive steps now, then in time you can have the Help Desk organization that you really want.

If you respond to increases in support requests without first planning, then you are likely to be less efficient, waste resources, and place yourself, or your employees under additional stress. The moral is, take the time to plan so that you can scale your Help Desk operations appropriately.

Are you the right group to be doing support? If not, then who should be doing this? Remember to answer these questions:

As you setup your Help Desk think about where questions will be coming from. Will most people be calling? Coming in person? Sending email? Or, what is the mix of these requests? Also, who is answering these questions? If it is a small staff be sure that traffic flows in such a way that this person can do their job. Here are some examples:

There are quite a few tools available that can make setting all of this up much easier. Larger organizations will often use professional Help Desk tools that may cost thousands of dollars. These tools are usually designed for groups with multiple phone lines, large staffs, and a phone call queue. Instead, here are a few tools that you may find invaluable, or at least useful, when setting up your support infrastructure.

There are tools available that replicate most of the functionality of the commercial tools mentioned above. Some of the tools listed below are invaluable and just as useful, if not more so, than their commercial counterparts. One thing to keep in mind as you assemble your tools: Whether the software you use is free or commercial is not important. What's important is whether it works well for what you are trying to do. Many groups have saved a few hundred dollars, but spent countless hours trying to get their work done. Hours that may be better spent doing something else. Still, if your organization does not have the resources to purchase everything you would like it is good to know that their are tools available to get the job done.

The best tool available for doing your job as a support professional is the Web, and it's free. The amount of information and resources available to you online are simply stunning. Almost every question you will be asked has been answered somewhere on the Web. Of course, there are always exceptions, but here are a few places to look when the answer is not obvious:

There are many different ways that groups support their clients. Answering the question above, "What is the direction of your support organization?", will lead to the way you support your users. Below are a few common scenarios of Help Desk operations. I present these to give you some ideas about what other people are doing and how they approach support.

Resources

Are you anywhere close to receiving the resources that you will need to get the job done? Resources include some of the following:

Who pays for all this? Are you a business? Then, as you grow, you should probably figure how much of your profits/earnings go towards supporting your Help Desk. If someone sets your budget, then start convincing them that you’ll need resources to answer user’s questions and why this is important. Remember, it’s important because if your users don’t know how to use what you’ve built, then they’ll use it poorly, inefficiently, and you are wasting money on the very infrastructure that you are building.

Chances are you won’t have the resources and budget that you need. This is true of almost every Help Desk I have ever seen. But, don’t despair, instead learn how to become efficient and prioritize. Figure out what it is that your users do most and put your efforts in to supporting that area. Be open with your users. Actually, if there is something that you cannot support because of lack of budget you might want to tell them that and let them be your advocate for more budgets. Naturally this will depend on your local political situation and who is in charge.

If you answer the same question over and over again, then document it, document it, document it! Sorry, but I can’t stress this enough. If you have common questions and answers well documented with procedures for doing whatever it is that your users do, then you have a quick and efficient method for dealing with those users. Give them the document, tell them to study it and follow the described procedures. If after doing this they have problems, then tell them to ask for help. Now, however, these users are much more likely to have specific questions and problems instead of general questions, which can take up inordinate amounts of you and your staff’s time.

Be sure to put your documentation on the Web. If you give out a CD or disks, then include it there as well. If your users come to you when the first sign up, give them the documents they are most likely going to need. Stress to them that they should keep these documents and they should read them before calling. If you can, when someone calls ask them if they have read and followed the instructions in your documents first. If not, ask them (politely) to give the document a try first and then to call back when they have specific questions. If this causes a problem, you can explain to them that there are only a few of your and many of them and that you need their help to get themselves up and running. If this still fails, I’ll discuss dealing with problem or upset users.

If you are unsure of what you should put your time and and energy towards first, then let your customers be your guide. Pay attention to what they are doing, what questions they are asking, and where you are spending most of your time. Try to make these areas work as well as possible. This means document every aspect of these areas, train your customers in these areas, hire your consultants and train them to support these areas, etc. This may mean that other areas will suffer. For instance, if 95% of your customers use Windows 9x, then be sure you are experts in this area and that someone is always available to answer questions on this platform. If 5% of your customers are using Unix, then it might be fair to let those customers know that getting them an answer may take a bit longer.

It's fairly difficult to track specifically what types of questions you are receiving unless you have a problem tracking system already in place. However, you can still get numbers like how many phone calls come in to your support area, how many hits you see on your Web pages, and how many people come in person for help. Based on these numbers you can prioritize your methods for giving out help, and possibly to some degree, what areas should receive the most attention.

This part can be critical to insuring a successful Help Desk. If you don’t have the ability to set policies that you can support based on the resources that you have, well, then you may find it rough going as you try to support your users. There are usually several levels of administration that a user can turn to if they disagree with the support you are providing. If you don’t have all of these levels on your side and understanding what you are doing, then a single user has the ability to compromise your support operations.

If you, as an employee, are following company or group policy and this upsets a user there is nothing worse than having a boss who doesn’t back you up. If your boss decides to “make an exception” for the user you are often the one who must pay in terms of time, and frustrations. Naturally, there can always be exceptions, and there should be, but if you are the one making it, then maybe you should be the one to deal with it as well.

If your department or group has an administrator be sure to keep that person well informed of what you do, what you don’t do, and why. If they don’t agree with you, then be sure that you get agreement from then as to what they expect you to be doing. If this person won’t backup your boss and your policies, then a user can go over your bosses head and become a nuisance in terms of time and resources.

If you are at a university be sure that the dean, provost, rector, president, or whoever oversees your budget is aware of what you are doing and agrees with you. A good person in this position will trust the people below them and refer users to your “bosses boss” if there are problems, except in extreme cases. If they overrule your policies, then providing support becomes more difficult.

This is an important component of what you do. There are many ways to go about this, but here are a few ideas that can help immensely:

This is an integral component of customer relations. Let them know from the very start what you can and cannot do for them. Let them know the types of services that are free and those that cost. An example of a document that explains this in some detail can be found at:http://micro.uoregon.edu/policy/index.html

Remember, here are the critical things to make clear when setting your user’s expectations:

This can be included in your documentation, web pages, installers, business cards, phone messages, etc.

This might include how long it takes to look at a machine if it is checked in, how long to return phone calls, email messages, etc. Also, train your consultants to follow up on questions and, even if they don’t have an answer, to let the customer know that they are still working on their problem.

I’ve already talked about some of this in terms of having your bosses in agreement with what you do, but there is more to this. You need to set guidelines and boundaries so that your customers don’t take more than you can give.

This is critical. Based on the resources and staff you have, then decide on what hours you are available for what types of consulting. These hours may be very specific to your situation, location, customers, etc. but figure out what they are and stick to them. In most cases you will find that your customers will be happier in the end. If they know what they can expect from you and when, then they won’t be disappointed if sometimes you answer the phone after 7:00 at night and other times you don’t.

This is also critical for your staff. If they feel like they must answer the phone even if they are just staying late and playing or learning, then their jobs will eventually become a burden. While many people may be grateful to have a job and to be learning, and they may be willing to work extra hard to keep such a job, the truth is they are only human. If they work too many hours they will become less efficient at their jobs and less enthusiastic. This doesn’t help anyone.

Backup Your Consultants

Create documentation (as mentioned above) that states what you do, how you do it, when you do it, what it costs, what you don’t do, why, and anything else that your customers need to know. Then, give your customers this document, put it on the Web, and place it in plain view. If there are pieces of your policies that apply to specific areas of your group be sure that these are clearly posted. For instance, if you let customers bring in their laptops for staff to look at them, well, you may want to think about this and how you implement it. Once you decide how you handle this situation put this policy in writing and place it right at your reception, or wherever the customer is likely to arrive.

For your consultants let them hand off difficult customers to a supervisor. If you have another level up and it becomes necessary, then let this person hand the customer off as well. Be clear between each level who can decide what. If a customer tries to jump the line it is often good to refer them back to the person below you first – if possible and/or appropriate. Making customers understand that whining louder may not get them results (sometimes it does!) can be a very useful tactic to have in place.

These are different than your policy statements. Acceptable use policies define what a user may and may not do when using your resources and how a user may use your resources. Acceptable use policies cover some of the following areas:

What about those clients who can't resolve their problem, or who will require excessive amounts of your staff time to resolve over the phone? Here are a few ways to deal with these cases:

Creating Your Support Organization

By this point you’ve thought about some of the issues involved with setting up and maintaining a support organization. If you are ready to go forward with the creation of a Help Desk, or, perhaps, the evolution of your current Help Desk, then here are some ideas for making this happen.

Sometimes this can be a serious problem. Do you have local talent who know enough to be able to help your customers? If not, then you may need to find people who are willing to learn and to train them. Someone with a good attitude can be worth 2 or 3 consultants who may know a lot, but aren’t all that interested in consulting.

Once again, you can probably find people who want the experience that are willing to work for less, at least at the start. But, remember, once someone is trained and useful, then paying them what they are worth is usually worthwhile. Losing someone who you have trained and who knows your environment can be quite expensive, especially if your staff is small.

If you don’t have a lot of money how to do you get people to work for you? If you have a decent network connection this might attract quite a few people If you have equipment they can use or install this can attract more people. It might be worth it to get a few good machines, servers, or network connections in to your support group so that you can attract more skilled people.

Plan for the future. How many consultants/staff do you think you may have. How many workstations? Will you have a place where the public can come and get help. Are you going to be taking in machines? If so, where will you store them if necessary? What about servers? Do you have a place for these, power, network?

Phones can be critical to your Help Desk. As you become more successful you can count on receiving more and more phone calls. Getting phone lines into your Help Desk area becomes a priority. Can you have just one number and then have this split into multiple lines? If so, you can use this to your advantage allowing several people to answer the phone at once. You may need to set aside resources and budget to pay for this type of equipment.

As you receive more calls you may want to consider having a wait queue. Another options is to allow users to go to a voice mail system and then you can call them back when you get the chance. I have found this to be very inefficient. The amount of time it takes to listen to a message, maybe transcribe it, and then call back the user who is likely no longer at the number is considerable. If at all possible, instituting a hold queue is much more efficient, and, in the long run, much less stressful. While consultants are answering the phone they are busy, but once they are finished with this duty, then they know that they are off.

If you allow users to leave a message, then you must call them back as soon as you can. If you have a hold queue, then this no longer becomes an issue. After hours, if possible, we recommend not allowing users to leave a message. All leaving a message does is to start your next day with you behind. You are required to expend resources calling users back who have left a message while other users are already trying to call you. Why not just tell your users that they can call back in the morning and let them do the work for you. The exception to this is if you need to have an emergency line, or if you must provide different levels of support.

Another option is to create a voicemail system (you can do this with a computer and software for very little money) that offers the user helpful tips if they are calling after hours. You can include answers to common questions and pointers to your Website, your hours, documents, etc. While only a few percent of your users may take advantage of this the actual setup is quite easy and the maintenance of such a system, once setup, is almost nil.

I’ve underlined this section because it is actually quite important and we may discuss this area in much more detail in class.

If your users are in a situation where they need to install and/or configure software to use your services, then I strongly recommend that you consider spending considerable time and effort towards the creation of an installer to automate this process. Your goal should be to reach the point where a new user can come to your Help Desk wanting to use your services and you can hand them an installer CD-ROM or disk set, and maybe some documentation. With these tools they can go home, follow instructions, install software, configure the software, and be up and running with, hopefully, no need to call you at all. If they do need your assistance, then it is much more likely to be for something specific, which will be much easier to deal with, than stepping them through the entire process from scratch.

The creation of an installer program can be done in several ways. The two most common products, for Windows, are currently:

If possible you will most likely want your installers, documentation, and software all placed on a CD-ROM that you can distribute to your customers. I have written an extensive Web page on the topic of creating a CD-ROM based on my experience from creating these for distribution as described above. At this point we’ll discuss this topic in more depth. For those of you reading this document I recommend viewing the CD-ROM link above and going over this.

I guess I can’t stress this enough. A document might take you a few hours, or even a day or two to create. Answering the same question over and over again will take much more time than this. You can improve your Help Desk’s efficiency to no end by documenting your important processes.

Train your users to use the Web and to use your Web pages to get help. Make it clear to them that even if there problem is that they cannot get connected they may still have a neighbor or friend who is connected. If you include your important documentation on-line, and, perhaps, more, then you’ve just given your users a great resource and method for helping themselves. Make the Web part of their daily routine, and yours. It’s much cheaper than printing documentation, and if you make changes, they are available to everyone instead of just those with the updated documents.

For an example of a Help Desk with a set of Web pages in the U.S. take a look at:

http://micro.uoregon.edu - There are many more, but I’ve reviewed quite a few of them and I think that these are quite good. For a group in Africa that’s put some of their Help Desk functions on-line see the EBONet pages at http://www.ebonet.net.

If you get ambitious you can use the web for help requests, to get user feedback, to sign up new users, to change passwords, and much more.

Providing an email address where customers can ask questions gives people a low priority, 24-hour method by which they can send in queries. If you can respond in some reasonable time period this can benefit both you and the customer assuming they can wait that long for a response. While email has the tremendous advantage that you can respond on your own time, it also has the disadvantage that a response can take much longer, particularly for complicated problems.

There are several ways to do this. I have found that using a mailing list (such as a Majordomo list) that has all your consultants on it is very useful. Each person is responsible for keeping track of what has and has not been answered. You can schedule specific people to respond to email at specific times as well if you find that people are not responding to email questions in a timely fashion.

This might sound like a silly little detail, but this can actually become quite problematic – particularly for full-time staff. If you respond to a query to your Help Desk email you should always include your Help Desk address in the “Cc:” field of the response. That way everyone knows that the question has been taken care of.

The tricky part is what do you put in the “From:” field? Technically speaking if you “spoof” the address and put in something like the Help Desk email address (I must confess that I do this for almost all Help Desk email that I respond to), this might be considered bad netiquette on your part. But, if you put in your personal email address then there is a strong likelihood that the user will respond directly to you and skip any instructions you may have to respond to the Help Desk email address and not the sender. You can always just forward their response back to the list, but this starts to get messy. One of the laws of consulting is that once a client knows a specific person who can help them, they are likely to go back to that person over and over again. This can cause problems for both you and for your clients.

If you work part time, then they may see a decrease in the service they get by relying just on you. Also, the more people who see their questions the better the chance that someone knows the answer. Or, what if you are on vacation, then they may ask, and ask and get no response. I’ve had this happen numerous times. I return from vacation to find angry email from customers who disregarded my directives to write to the group and not just me, thus these customers are wondering why I have not responded.

So, even though it is less than perfect, I recommend that when you respond to Help Desk email that you make the “From:” field be the Help Desk email address for your group. For smaller groups with fewer clients this is not as important, but as your organization grows this will become more important as this makes your email service more efficient.

When someone contacts your Help Desk via email you can use an auto-responder to give them pointers to on-line documentation, or, perhaps your dialup numbers, or other commonly requested bits of information. Another useful feature of the auto-responder is that you can remind the customer that you need as much information as possible from them to be able to help them. You may want to include a request that they write you back and include the following information:

Over time you are likely to amass a large number of responses that you have given to your customers. You may find that some of these responses are similar to almost identical. It is possible to keep a database of these responses and then just use them over and over again when someone asks a question.

In reality, however, I have not found this to be very practical. Even if the question is the same, it’s usually just different enough that by the time you change your canned response you could have simply written a response directly. Instead, you’ll probably just create Web pages or documents for your most common questions that don’t already have documentation that you can give to the user.

Using a tool such as Mhonarc under UNIX you can create a searchable collection of email responses and questions over time. This can be incredibly useful if you are looking for a response that you know someone in your group previously sent. This is a great resource for customers as well. It’s almost likely having a huge, searchable FAQ of issues that people have run into, and that have been resolved at their fingertips.

If you give create an account that receives all Help Desk email queries and responses (be sure to give it enough space!), then you can simply take the UNIX mailboxes and use a program like Mhonarc to index each question and present these as a searchable set of forms on the Web. You can, also, view these messages by date or author. If you receive many messages (say 1,000+ each year), then you may want to split your Mhonarc searchable indices up by year.

To start with, almost all real-time, database-driven commercial Help Desk tracking systems are very expensive! There are multiple products available from companies like Symantec (http://www.symantec.com), GoldMine Software (http://www.bendata.com/), Mcafee (http://www.mcafee.com), etc. Typical pricing for a 5 to 10 user system is in the $20,000 to $30,000 range. These systems assume that you are using a telephone hold queue and that you take down customer information when they call so that you can track their problems to resolution and see previous problems they may have had. These systems include many other features, such as the ability to catalogue equipment types for each user on your network (if you know this), their email addresses, etc. Common answers and questions are indexed as well.

There are, however, many other systems that are less expensive and many free, or almost free products. Picking one that is right for you will require some researech and reading. A popular Unix solution based on Perl is called "Req" - You can read about it here:

In truly large organizations with many Help Desk employees these type of solutions, or in-house solutions may become a necessity. If you think that you may be scaling up to these levels, then you may want to start investigating automated Help Desk tracking systems. In terms of sizes, I am referring to organizations with many thousands of users who receive several hundred phone calls every day and have 15, 20, or more consultants on their staff. Even at these sizes, you may still find that good processes and management can take care of what needs to be done.

This is a tough question to answer. Should you build a customized Help Desk solution? Some people will immediately answer “yes” to this while others emphatically say “no.” I have had experience with multiple in-house database and partial Help Desk solutions, and, in general, have found them to be less than satisfactory.

I’ve seen several help groups that encourage their users to install ICQ and then run this as a method for communicating with them. This can be most helpful if users must make long distance phone calls to reach your Help Desk. You can also simulate ICQ using javascript programs in a Web browser. There are some issues with using a client like ICQ. These include:

One step up from NetMeeting. This allows for voice communication, whiteboard, and chatting. NetMeeting is a free product from Microsoft and comes with several of their software packages. You can also download this product from:

As an aside, I have not used these services in a Help Desk environment, but I have seen them in action. Personally, if possible, I would stick to the telephone as this is a more efficient method of communication.

Remote control products are very intriguing. Some institutions install remote control clients by default on all their customer machines so that they can see their desktops if there are problems. Generally this is done by having a remote control client/server package on the machine, but not actively running. This way a consultant can ask the customer to start this software when necessary and they can view the customer’s desktop from a remote location. Naturally this assumes a network connection of some type to be able to do this.

There are several remote control products available for the PC and Mac. These include PC Anywhere from Symantec and Timbuktu from Netopia (http://www.netopia.com/software/tb2/). Other than some additional functionality the main benefit you might see from using one of these products is the possibility of encrypting your remote control session. Otherwise, the current (May 2000) product that I would choose is a free product developed by AT&T labs in England called VNC. You can download servers, viewers, and instructions for this product directly from http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/. There are versions for Windows, the Mac, and UNIX. And, as a unique feature, you can use a Web Browser to view a machine’s desktop remotely. You don’t need any additional software. All you need to know is the IP address of the machine running the VNC software. So, if you wanted to see the desktop of the machine at IP address 128.228.10.10 you could simply enter the following in your Browser address:

VNC uses port 5800 to access it’s service on the remote machine. You will need to know the access password to get to this machine. Once in you can see and control the machine’s desktop in your Browser window. A few things to know about this software:

When you install VNC, the first time you run it, you will be asked to enter in a password, and to choose some setting details. Enter in a reasonable password and generally you can just choose the default settings. Note, if you want the VNC server to run each time you start your machine you can do the following:

Finally, we have found VNC to be very stable (with current versions!) and quite efficient. The screen redraw of VNC is comparable to that of expensive commercial products such as PC Anywhere.

This is a task that can take up considerable time depending on the size of your staff. Someone should be designated as the contact for all matters relating to scheduling. If this changes, or if this is several people and you staff is large enough, then consider using an alias that points to several people.

Over the years we have tested several scheduling programs, and in the end we have returned to manual methods. Using an Excel spreadsheet that contains several workbooks with people’s available hours, the schedule, and that keeps running totals of hours scheduled for everything has worked quite well. Two sample versions of this Excel spreadsheet are available for download:

Schedule with names and student schedules filled in as an example:
schedule_full.xls

Another option is in-house custom solutions. Our group (Microcomputer Services at the University of Oregon) likes to use the Web whenever possible since this removes any restrictions based on location. We are currently working on a client-based (server side) scheduling solution. This solution acts much like a spreadsheet with macros, but allows the user to enter his or her available hours, schedule, personal information, etc. This system has not yet been fully tested, but we hopeful that it will be useful.

As a support organization that answers customer questions in real-time we consider our schedule and assigned times to be of the utmost importance. If one employee misses a shift, then others must make up for this. Thus, in this area we are fairly strict. If an employee misses three shifts without notification and without reasonable reasons, then we let them go. We call this the “three strikes” rule (based on the game of baseball) – on the third strike you are out.

Proactive Steps

Oftentimes the sheer volume of requests for help and the lack of staff needed to answer these requests overwhelm a support organization. If you find this information in this document helpful, and you can reach the point where you do not need to react to everything that comes in, then it may be time to take some proactive steps. Being proactive by training your clients, your staff, and making your clients better and smarter computer users has many benefits. If your clients know enough, then they will start asking you questions that are more specific and, possibly, easier to answer. Even better, they might answer some of their questions themselves! We’ve seen it happen.

Make this part of your organization. If you have training available, then when you have clients that don’t know enough to even follow simple instruction you will have a way to deal with them. You can point them towards your training and explain that they need to do some of this

One note about training – to do it right takes up quite a bit of time for whoever is going to be presenting. Creating an original training session (materials, outlines, handouts, verifying that it all works, setting up a lab, etc.) can take someone days. Usually the trade-off is worth it, but only if people actually attend. Don’t forget this – if people don’t attend, or if attendance is low, then your effort is largely wasted.

One nice thing to note is that once you’ve created the first session, then the next should be much easier and faster to do.

If you don’t have the resources or inclination you can always use your in-house expertise to generate additional income for your organization. Fee-based training can also be offered to large groups, such as local businesses. They may need some specialized training, and doing this right may require that you dedicate a staff member to creating this training. Remember that a staff member uses resources in terms of their time, their pay, the space they use, the machine(s) they use, your time to schedule and supervise them, etc. Look at these carefully and decide if the income you receive pays for all this. Or, perhaps, you aren’t worried about this, but realize that doing this type of training will improve your image in the local community, and might even bring in more clients.

This is just critical. That’s why the topic is underlined. Your documentation is the “bread and butter” of your organization. Without it you will simply explain the same thing over and over when you could let the user read the explanation instead, thus freeing up your time to answer more questions and to improve your support. If you only see your user’s once, then be sure to get as much of your documentation as possible in their hands when you first see them. Remember that documentation does not need to be in printed form. You can place your documentation on a CD in the form of Webpages (HTML-formatted), PDF files, text files, Word files, etc. You should also make all of this available on-line at your Website so that once your user is connected they have access to your documents.

In our group, when a user calls, if it becomes apparent that they have not read our initial documents for doing things like getting connected, then we require them to do this before we’ll answer questions for them. We do not have the time or resources to talk someone through this entire process over and over again.

We even go so far as to require that they come in person to our Help Desk and pickup our CD-ROM if they have not done so. We do, however, have some advantages as we also distribute our CD-ROM in several locations, and we make it available at the start of each year to thousands of people. If your users cannot easily come in and they do not have the documentation, then you may need to step them though a process like getting connected the first time. This is why you will want to get this type of documentation in their hands the first time you see them – when they sign up for your service (whether this be a commercial, non-profit, or academic organization).

If you notice that there are processes that your users are routinely doing, and for which you have no documentation, then these are likely candidates for a document and/or a Webpage explaining in details these processes. When you create these pages or documents I recommend using as many pictures as possible. I’m personally a fan of this and it makes it much easier for your users to follow.

As the Internet continues to grow in importance your Website can be a big help towards providing user support. If you get your users used to the idea that once they are connected you probably have an answer to their question on your site, then this can save you more time. You can, also, place important announcements on your site’s main page. If you distribute a CD-ROM, or have a network installer, you can consider making the user’s home page be your Website’s main page.

My goal in our group is that any document we create also exists on our Website. Our ultimate goal is to make the creation of a document or Webpage be the same thing to avoid duplicating effort. So far, there is no perfect process for doing this. If you need to create very specifically formatted documents, then HTML is not the best tool for this. You can always save documents to PDF format, but many users have a hard time reading this. Naturally, if you are using current Browser versions (I.E. 5.x, and Netscape 4.7, or above), and you install Adobe Acrobat on the user’s machine, then this can work quite well.

This may seem obvious, but it is often overlooked. If you have specific ways of doing things, or complicated processes, then be sure that you have trained your staff in these areas. At the very least, require that your staff read your documentation and your Website. This is important, because the materials may be easy for them to understand, but you may have implied methods and policies in your documents. If your users hear multiple, different responses to the same questions, then they are likely to get confused and frustrated.

If you can train your staff in advanced topics, such as network protocols, packets, packet filtering, server services, etc. then they will understand the foundation of how things work. This is invaluable. The more your staff has a fundamental understanding of how things work, the better they will become at troubleshooting. This is also a benefit of the job. If word gets out that working for you means learning a lot more than just answering basic questions, then you are more likely to attract talented people.

Now that you’ve got some basic training in place for your staff see if you can set aside some more time and start to train them even more. The better trained your staff is, the better consultants they will be when helping your clients.

Don’t forget that among your staff you probably have experts in several areas, perhaps in areas that neither you or anyone else knows much about. This is an excellent resource that you can take advantage of. You can ask your staff to lead some trainings in these areas. When you do this you might want to stress that they don’t need to create an amazing presentation. I’ve seen many times where support staff take this too seriously and become stressed that there presentation must be perfect.

As you grow your organization hopefully your support staff will grow as well. This gives you the opportunity to provide some time to each staff person to do individual research, training, or, perhaps, an assigned project. Oftentimes the support group will be in charge of servers, or of server services, such as your Website. Allowing your staff members an hour or two a week to read up on areas they don’t understand so well, or to give them a more challenging project, makes for a happier group of people.

Some typical projects that you may have, but which could go to your support staff include:

There are several ways to look at this. One way is to guess and react to whatever your users are using and then learn as much as you can about these products and support them well. Another method is to tell everyone what they will use and what you support. In both cases, however, keeping up-to-date with these products keeps you one step ahead of your user base.

For instance, if new Web browser versions are released, even if they are only minor updates, be sure that someone downloads this and takes a close look at what’s new. Sometimes you’ll be surprised at the changes that are made and how they might impact your organization. A classic example of this is Microsoft’s insistence that by default Internet Explorer 5 wants to use a proxy server. This change was not advertised at all and it is just critical. There are all sorts of subtle ways that things break or slow down when a user’s Web browser tries to go through a proxy server if none are setup.

Most likely the most critical areas to stay-up-date with when it comes to most users will be versions of Windows and new hardware as it becomes available. I recommend trying to set aside some piece of your support staff budget for acquisition of the latest Windows versions, but more importantly for purchasing new hardware from time-to-time so that you will be intimately familiar with what your users are using. I know that this is not always practical, but when possible it is very useful. It’s also another great job benefit for your staff if they get to play with new toys from time to time.

Conclusion

Creating a support organization that works and that scales over time requires that you make decisions about what you will be supporting, how you are going to get the resources to do this, making sure your administration agrees with what you are doing, and then implementing your support plans to become as efficient as possible. With some planning this whole process can go much more smoothly than if you suddenly find yourself reacting to an increase in support requests with the staff or budget to do this well. This document is not the definitive right way to do things, but is a distillation of what I have experienced and several of my coworkers have experienced working in several support/Help Desk organizations over the past 15 years I would like to close by saying that helping someone to solve their problem can be a very rewarding experience. So much so that it can make all the work and occasional frustration worth it. In our group we always try to communicate openly and honestly with users about what we can and cannot do and why. We have found this makes our interactions go much more smoothly over time. Our other rule is to treat the user with respect and to be sympathetic. Often someone calls and they are frustrated, but once they calm down they become much easier to deal with.Good luck as you create and expand your support organizations.

Appendix A

The Troubleshooting Process

Chances are if you are reading this document and you are the one in charge of, or working for, a support organization, then you are already intimately familiar with this process. However, since we all approach this a bit differently I present my view of this process below in outline form:

My assumption is that at this time almost all your support questions will come from clients running some version of Windows. Future version of this document may include some Macintosh Unix/Linux specific information.

Since it’s release in 1995 Windows 95 has gone through multiple updates. Some of these affect dramatically basic functionality and hardware support.

To begin, if you have a machine with USB and a Pentium II, or higher, process, then I do not recommend running Windows 95, but rather you should be using Windows 98. Windows 95 is lacking hardware support for many newer devices, and, most importantly, does not support USB correctly.

Below is a table listing Window version names, version numbers, and dates on the CAB files. The version number is available by right clicking on the My Computer icon and choosing "Properties..." from the context menu:

Comments on Specific Versions of Windows:

Windows 95/95a

Works well on older machines. Requires significantly less RAM and hard drive space than Windows 98. Even with patches USB will not work reliably on this version of Windows. Note that TCP/IP is not installed by default. This requires your users to go through quite a few additional steps to setup dialin access.

Windows 95b

Similar to Windows 95a, but with several bug fixes, additional hardware support, and the USB patch. Not recommended if you need USB support. No TCP/IP installed by default.

Window 95c

Includes USB patch, but more importantly has an updated dialin client. You should be aware of this when writing documentation. The menu choices for this version of the dialin client are different and the way it acts after connecting is different as well. Included a patched TCP/IP stack to protect against several attacks including the “Ping of Death.” No TCP/IP installed by default.

Windows 98

Includes a dramatically increased set of supported hardware. First version of Windows that supports USB reliably (sort of!). Note that RAM usage for Windows 98 increases dramatically. Multiple interface enhancements including taskbar start items, ability to alphabetize entries in the Program group off the Start menu using the context menu (oh boy!), and several other such interface enhancements.

NOTE! This version of Windows finally installs TCP/IP by default, however Microsoft removed the default installation of IPX/SPX. If you use Novell on your network you now have a new support headache.

Includes dramatically improved control over your startup environment, but this is well hidden. Find the System Monitor tool under the Start menu, Programs, Accessories, System Tools. Once started go to the Tools menu and choose System Configuration Utility. This tool finally lets you remove Startup items that are buried in your registry. Under the Tools menu in the System Monitor tool are several other useful utilities that you may want to take a look at.

98 2^nd Edition

An interesting secret about this version of Windows 98 is that there are several sub-versions, none of them documented (as far as I know). So, if you have a Windows 98 Second Edition CD from the first month of its release this is different than the Windows 98 2^nd edition CD you might have that comes with a new machine.

Windows 98 2^nd edition supports additional hardware and uses yet more RAM. The 2^nd edition also includes the home IP services that let one machine act as a network gateway if you have an internal home network. That is, one machine can dial in and then Windows 98 2^nd addition will do Network Address Translation (NAT) for you.

Windows Memory and Machine Requirements

Windows 95

You can get Windows 95 to work with 16MB of RAM on a 486. It will be slow, and a few 486 CPU’s won’t run Windows 95, but it will work. Note that you can run Windows 95 with 8MB, but don’t do this! What happens is that everything eventually opens, but then things fail randomly. This is because the machine does not have enough memory to run the operating system and any reasonable application. Netscape version 3 and 4 will not run correctly on this type of machine.

Windows 95 runs well on a Pentium with 32MB of RAM. Naturally, if you are installing Office 97 or 2000, then you will want 48 to 64MB of RAM instead.

Window 98

Window 98 really needs a Pentium 233, or above, and 64MB of RAM. Really, you just gotta have 64MB of RAM to use Windows 98 with any reliability whatsoever. A critical piece of this is that dialin connections are especially susceptible to lack of RAM. If the machine is swapping to disk, then it cannot deal with serial communications and you will get program crashes or machine freezes.

Now, here’s the fun part; Windows 98 2^nd edition when loaded starts by using 64MB of RAM. If you plan on running Office 97 or 2000, Windows 98 2^nd edition, and a Web Browser, then you need 128MB of RAM to do this reliably. You can get away with 96MB of RAM, but with Office 2000 it will be slow.

Windows NT

These versions of the Window operating system is actually self-contained and fairly secure. That means that there is no underlying DOS at the heart of the OS. While this has obvious benefits, it also means that it is not fully compatible with Windows 9x programs. If a user is planning to migrate from Windows 9x to Windows NT they should first verify that allt heir current programs will run under Windows NT. In addition, Windows NT will not reliably install onto numerous newer hardware platforms, or will not fully support many newer devices. NT is best used if you have a specific solution that you need and you want stability. Ofentimes NT may take a while to get configured, but once configured it tends to be much more stable than Windows 98 - and it actually uses less resources.

From a user standpoint, Windows NT is much more difficult to configure and use. Here are a few differences from Windows 9x:

Dialup and standard networking are completely different.
there is no System Control Panel where the user can access hardware device specifics directly.
The DOS prompt is much different and uses different commands.
There is no support for Video input, such as Webcams, in Windows NT.
Many soundcards will not work.
Many popular games will not work.
Many graphics cards are only partially supported.

Windows 2000

It's hard to say if Windows 2000 will be a success or not.While the Operating System generally supports newer hardware and is generally more stable, it is also much more complex. Simple things like setting up Dial Up Networking are much more complicated. Take a look at these pages to see what I mean:

Windows 2000 Dialup Networking Configuration
http://micro.uoregon.edu/getconnected

Also, note that Windows 2000 really wants 128MB of RAM on a PII 300 Mhz machine as a minimum configuration.

Hardware Issues

Some Machines to Watch out For

Naturally you may not have a choice if the user has already made their purchase. But, if you can help people to choose their hardware wisely, then here are some tips.

Most of the home machines from Hewlett-Packard and Compaq are just painful to deal with. They often lack RAM and hard drive space and they use proprietary or integrated devices to save money. A particularly painful part of many of these machines are the integrated Winmodem, Telephony, Sound cards. I cannot begin to describe how bad an idea these are!
Anything made by Packard-Bell should be avoided at all costs. These are just plain bad machines.
Some of the integrated Sony and Toshiba units had problems because there hardware was so complex they only give you “System Recovery CD’s” – This meant that if you needed to do an OS re-install you would blow away the user’s custom configurations, software installs, and in some cases their data. Note that this true of many of the Compaq and Hewlett-Packard machines as well.

For each of these there are exceptions. The key is to look closely at the machine specifications and decide if it looks acceptable.

Winmodems or Host Based Modems

Over the past several years we have seen these modems proliferate because they are cheap, and when they work you can get some good connection speeds. The problem with these modems are several:

When they fail it is often software-related. Re-installation of these modems is different for each and every one and often completely unintuitive. Actually, the re-install is so far above what most users can do that the modem might as well be physically damaged at this point. I have had several interactions with companies (Dell, AST, and Compaq) where the technicians indicated they would rather ship the user a new modem than try to troubleshoot the problem over the phone. In one case (with AST) the technician did not know how to fix the modem, but we were able to do it on our own.
Winmodems often lack essential features that can cause connection problems. This is because Winmodems are inexpensive. To cut costs sometimes features are left out.
If you need support on your Winmodem, like the correct initialization string, there might not be any. Many Winmodems are made by third party and no support is available from these groups. Note that looking at the chipset on the Winmodem (often Rockwell) can be useful. Sometimes you can go the chip manufacturer’s page and get the information you need.

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Release Version	Version Number	Date(s) on CAB Files
Windows 95 retail, OEM	4.00.950	7/11/95*
Windows 95 retail SP1	4.00.950A	7/11/95
OEM Service Release 1	4.00.950A	7/11/95
OEM Service Release 2	4.00.1111 or (4.00.950B)	8/24/96
OEM Service Release 2.1	4.03.1212-1214 (4.00.950B)	8/24/96-8/27/97
OEM Service Release 2.5	4.03.1214 (4.00.950C)	8/24/97-11/18/97
Windows 98 retail, OEM	4.10.1998	5/11/98
Windows 98 Second Edition	4.10.2222A	4/23/99

Help Desk and Support Organizations

Why I’m Here – Not a Technical Topic, but Often Overlooked

Typical Scenario – You the Technician Answer the Questions – This Does Not Scale Well

Getting Started – What Are Some of the First Questions to Answer?

Scalability

Starting from Scratch

Resources

Backup Your Consultants

Creating Your Support Organization

Proactive Steps

Conclusion

Appendix A

The Troubleshooting Process