1- Customer service –
2- Help desk
3- Technical support

Customer Services and Help desk are a subset of a Technical Support department.

Customer Service – Is the liason between Technical Support and the customer. The primary role is to make sure the customer has a voice in the technical support process, while at the same time, allowing the technical support staff to focus on the technical issues.

Help Desk – Is the first group that is contacted by the customer when an incident occurs. The help desk is made up of technical experts solving incident problems.

A common situation in large environments. An incident is escalated to a point where an Incident “Bridge” is created. On the bridge are technicians, developers, 3rd party vendor technicians, technical architects all trying to understand and resolve a technical incident.

The last place you want your customer would be on the technical bridge. So a seperate customer bridge is opened up but the Customer Services group. They liason with the technical bridge to keep the customer aprised on the progress of the indicent. Customer services job is to make sure the customer is kept aprised and all questions from the customer are answered as quickly as possible.

After the incident is resolved, Customer Service continues to follow-up with the customer with updates on the root cause analsys that might help the customer.

1- Customer service
2- Help desk
3- Technical support

As member Chippy088 mentioned. For our discussion, I want a great service, regardless which department I am calling.

And as member charliebrowne wrote about the great customer service he received, I hope this become the industry standard, but unfortunately, these 2 companies are the exception.

And as member Ekardris wrote about the triage, it’s understood that there is some type of follow up and moving the issues to higher levels, but the problem is when the commutation breaks between tier 1 and tier 2, when the issue is not documented properly and it’s very common

What the caller sees when calling in a problem should be just the tip of the iceberg. The caller should first talk to a someone who will triage the problem. This triage attempts to identify the problem well enough to get the caller into the right queue. From triage the caller is escalated through a tiered process of support. Each tier is numbered with 1 being first tier up through the tier system.

Problem that are unknown issues go to problem manamgnet for Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Problem management first identifies unknown errors and records the fixes in the Incident Managmnet database.

In your comment you mention that the caller keeps repeating the problem. Part of this is because each tier in the incident management process has a more expertienced technician trying to solve the problem. If the first tier technician doesn’t explain the problem well enough in the ticket, the 2nd tier technician has to start the troubleshooting process all over again. The same thing happens for 3rd tier and for Problem Managment. Each tier reviews the ticket from the last tier. If the information needed isn’t available then the tech needs to start the troubleshooting process over again.

To deal with this problem another behind the scenes team call QA (quality assurance) reviews the tickets for quality. Definitions of each field for the ticket are created and the QA reviews tickets and follows up to train and re-enforce the quality of the entries. The QA team calls out when support processes doing work or when a technician refuses to enter the right information in the ticket.

So the hierarchy goes something like this…

Triage
Tier 1
Tier 2
Tier 3
Problem Managment RCA

With QA following up behind to enforce the quality of the tickets.

There are more roles in the Customer Service process, but this is a quick down and dirty in the areas Managment tips was discussing.

Help desks seem to assume it is a ‘user ignorance’ thing causing their perfect kit not to do what the user bought it for. This is their downfall. We are the type of people who could man the phone and give a good, polite and clearly define answer. Because we have the knowledge and genuinely want to help. I like to think that is well appreciated by our client/customers.

Call centres, are different, in my opinion, as they are mainly directly tied in with sales and billing, so they have to be polite, acurate, and more flexible in their responses, or the sale is lost. What a contrast to help desks.

Great opening line. That’s another thing IT might do — provide a “Don’t you hate it when…” forum for customer comments. You don’t know what should be done if customers can’t tell you what they need.

Tom

You know (as a techie) you have already done all they tell you to do, but they will not/cannot pass it on to tech support until you have done what is on their check list.

A classic example is a worldwide very well known company, who supply broadband/phone and television packages. The call would be answered by a call centre and a series of checks would be performed by reading off a list, on their computer screen, and subsequent questions would be asked until a solution was found, or it would be passed up the line because it is a fault in the equipment. I had already told them what the fault was.

One of the instructions was to switch the router off and on. When it was done, the phone line was also disconnected, and the whole process had to be repeated when you redialled their help line. This was a feature that was a selling point, so why wasn’t it taken into consideration when the check list was created?

I do not have this problem with a business that has purchased more expensive kit, as there is tech support number to a proper human tech, not a plastic one reading things they don’t even understand.

The moral of the story, save money with these help lines, and you are guarranteed to annoy customers so they buy a competitors kit next time around.