Tag Archives: Help Desk

Incident Management, Management

Understanding How Your Help Desk and NOC Services Connect

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This post about the Help Desk and NOC was initially published on CX Expert. It has been updated to reflect current market trends and information.

Perhaps, there is no other obstacle that causes more concern to managed services providers than how they are going to manage, monitor and provide services to their clients. For companies that are getting into managed services or cloud, one obstacle must be tacked. This obstacle is what you will do about your help desk and NOC. You must determine the best practices to follow, the cost, and many other essential things.

Origin of the NOC

The help desk and NOC is the heart of managed services providers. It is capable of providing redundancy, physical security and an area that is secure for collaboration for technicians to be able to manage and monitor customer environments.

Every managed service provider (MSP) service delivery model needs the NOC. However, many people don’t know where the idea of the NOC came from and how the early MSPs came to rely on them. With the advent of cloud computing and other business process and technological advances, it is essential to know how different factors influenced the NOC for the cloud provider and MSP today.

The idea of the NOC is not new – it has been around for a very long time. Initially, it was a creation of telecommunications, and it was used to monitor and manage telecommunications networks. Technicians sit and receive information in real-time inside the NOC. The NOC’s physical configuration allows for an intimate, secure and safe place for technicians to collaborate and discuss with other technicians on issues and problems that would otherwise be unsafe or unsuitable around other non-approved personnel.

MSPs came into existence in the mid-1990s. During this time, nearly all companies had a business plan. The plan included a 27/7 operational NOC that was physically secure from which to deliver their managed services. These configurations, procedures, and tools used in each of the MSPs were different, but the presence of the physical NOC was an essential and consistent characteristic.

The Help Desk and its Importance

A lot of people confuse the terms help desk and NOC when they serve two different and vital functions. The main reason behind the confusion is easy to understand when you look back at how they both came into being and how they have been split apart gradually in modern time managed services conditions.

We have already discussed the role of NOC, but it is important to look at how the help desk fits in the equation. Older NOCs have the help desk integrated into them to maximize the benefits of security, redundancy and collaborative work environments. The simplest and easiest way of distinguishing and defining the two models is system-based work, and the NOC performs network around the management and monitoring of objects that are under management with the MSP. On the other hand, the help desk is more responsible for interfacing with end-users, and it is also a customer-facing department. It helps to respond to problems and get solutions.

It is easy to see why the two areas seem to be similar. Each company should make these choices on their own, but it is important to understand that there is a difference between the two and they service unique and important functions within managed services practice.

The Interaction Between the Help Desk and the NOC

Now that we know the difference between help desk and the NOC, we must look at how they should interact with each other in managed services practices. It is important to acknowledge that there are different ways in which help desk and the NOC interact and co-exist.

Helpdesk Existing Within the NOC

Having a help desk and a NOC should be evident. All MSP’s logical and physical security controls can be addressed in one physical space. The physical access to workstations, how technicians log in to systems belonging to clients and change management are important to control and can be monitored effectively and be enforced if the NOC has the help desk residing into it.

There are more configurations where the MSP can create an entire floor of their work premises, where the help desk teams and the NOC teams work, complete with secure access, albeit in sections within the secure area. The main purpose of mingling the help desk and the NOC is to take advantage of the process efficiencies and security. If you take the security of your operation into account in the same way, there is no need to build out different facilities. Instead, you can just build it once.

There are many other benefits to have the configuration. Any interaction between the help desk and the NOC is naturally easier when they are both located within the same secure area. This can help with redundancy, and the continuity of the business plans should anything happen to the facility.

The Help Desk Existing Outside the NOC

In larger MSP environments, you will find the help desk outside the NOC. This is common, but it will depend on your unique situation. In most cases, you will find large companies with the help desk located outside the NOC because the help desk team won’t fit within the NOC. Typically, MSPs that need to have multi-time zone help desks or multilingual helpdesk do not manage the MSP centrally, but they have several help desk facilities that are located in different locations.

It is not always needed to build full NOC around all the help desk areas. Therefore, help desks exist outside the NOC. Regardless of how you operate and configure your NOC and help desk, there should be enough controls that deal with how the two elements in your business interact with one another. There should be documentation on the handling of trouble tickets, the handling of the connectivity within the MSP and how the redundancy of power is handled within the MSP organization to maintain operational effectiveness.

Management

THE HELPDESK

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What is it?

In its simplest form, a helpdesk is a group of people assigned to assist customers in solving their problems.  There are many different types of helpdesks and they are called by a variety of different names depending on the function that they serve, however the main point to make clear is that their purpose is to resolve a specific issue for a paying customer.

Types of Help Desks

At its simplest, you could break down Help Desks into two main types. There are definitely sub categorizations within each type and quite often they are called different things, but from an end users point of view there are really only two different types:

Customer Service – this type of helpdesk is generally more administrative in function and scope. They would provide customers with account information and perhaps act in a sales capacity with regards to new services and other offerings that might suit the client’s needs.

Technical Operations – break/fix or tech support or network operations or the NOC. The names are many and varied for this type of team, but their primary purpose is to resolve a specific incident or problem and restore the customer’s service in a timely manner as possible. Frequently this team is considered the 2nd level and is senior to the Customer Service team but this is not always the case.

Customer Service Helpdesks

Often referred to as a Contact Centre, these types of teams are more administrative in function and responsibility.  They are frequently called upon to provide customers with account information or deal with billing concerns.  While they may arrange visits with or escalate issues to the technical team, these individuals do not generally have the skills in-house to troubleshoot and resolve customer “problems”.

Quite often you will find that companies outsource this function to other companies and even other countries as it is more of a generic job then Technical and Operational Support.  However, in recent years this trend has been reversing as regardless of the cost, companies are striving to present customers with a more intelligent and higher quality of service.  Please note, outsourcing is not inherently bad by any means – if done properly, customers will receive a faster response time and all the information that they require to resolve their account issue.  However – to provide this level of support, companies need to provide the outsourcer with a significant level of access into their own internal systems and customer records.  In addition to this, the training that the outsourcer provides to their own staff is generally at a lower level than that provided internally – hence the quality of the answers provided are generally not at the same level.

In addition to the quality issues mentioned above, companies are actually using the fact that they provide service “in house” as a selling point, hoping in some cases to garner more customers simply based on “national pride”.

Incident & Problem Management

As mentioned previously, these teams are known by a variety of different names, but probably the most accurate name for them is the Service Desk. Based on the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) framework, the Service Desk is a component of the Incident Management team and they are responsible for resolving incidents and escalating problems.

What is an Incident?

Simply put, an incident is anything related to customer contact (incidents are also reported by automatic means via monitoring tools and I will discuss those types of incidents in greater depth in later posts).

Please note – Incidents are not restricted to technical teams, but can be something that a Customer Service team deals with also.

Incidents related to customers can be anything really – Information requests, Account Updates, Issue reporting are all examples of Incidents. All of these different Incidents coming from/through different sources would get routed to your Incident Management tool. For smaller teams this could be something as simple as a spreadsheet but in larger organizations either in-house customer built applications or enterprise level tools prevail.

Incident Management (in a nutshell)

Your helpdesk is responsible for reviewing the information in each of these incidents and checking if there is an appropriate solution already available to the customer.

For those instances for example where the customer wishes to update their Account Information, the helpdesk would look at the Incident, obtain the correct new information (& assuming that all appropriate security questions had been reviewed) log into the customers account and update the information. Once the information had been updated, they would inform the customer and then close the Incident. This is probably one of the simpler examples of an Incident from start to finish.

If the customer is reporting a problem or an issue, the Helpdesk staff are responsible for updating the Incident with all the relevant details as supplied by the customer. If the customer’s issue matches a known fix they are able to inform or supply that fix to the customer, however, if that is not the case they would need to escalate the issue to the Problem Management team.

The simplest way to think of the Incident Management (Helpdesk/Tier1) team and the issues they resolve is that if a “band-aid” exists they can apply it. If more drastic attention is required they will need to call the Doctor!

Problem Management

Problem Management is where the interesting work really happens. Incident Management due to its repetitive nature can get tedious and is definitely a drain on the more skilled staff in your organization … if you have people like that, think about moving them into Problem Management if you have such a team or create one if you don’t!

Problem Management is more in-depth. It’s where more often than not a single Problem is the cause of multiple Incident’s from multiple customers … as such you want your best people at this level. you would consider this Tier 2 or Tier 3 from an escalation and staffing perspective and dependent on your product or service you would have some very technically oriented people there. Their goal is not to just provide a band-aid, but rather to find out why the problem happened in the first place and fix it. they should be looking at ways to fix it in such a way as to ensure that it doesn’t happen again!!

KPI’s & Metrics

Regardless of the type of Help Desk you are running or dealing with there must be specific requirements in place to ensure that they are performing to peak efficiency and that they are resolving customer inquiries in a timely manner. A common industry term for these metrics is KPI – Key Performance Indicator and there are hundreds of different ones depending on the product and service you provide as well as what you want to measure and what is most important to your business.    

Now each of these teams would have different metrics in place. However, some that are common to both Customer Service and Technical Teams are as follows:

Response Time –

Obviously, your team (Incident Management/Customer Service/Helpdesk) needs to get back to the customer in a timely manner. Their goal as already mentioned is to fix it, fix it fast and move on.

A band-aid will not always reattach the finger though, so it’s up to the Tier2 team to ensure that the surgery goes smoothly which obviously takes a lot more time as you don’t want the surgeon doing a shoddy job!     So with that analogy in mind … you want to have an aggressive goal set for your Helpdesk – try to work with the 80/20 rule (The Pareto principle) … 80% of incidents responded to in 20 seconds (If you have the resources, otherwise maybe 20 minutes? Or 20 hours (that’s less than 1 day so might still be good – especially if you’re doing email support)? Or 20 days … well that’s probably not really worthwhile) but hopefully you get the point?

You want to set a specific goal for measuring how quickly your customers are getting a response.    

Resolve Time –

Notice that I have separated these out. As much as you’d like to be able to resolve 100% of issues at that first contact, it’s not always going to be possible. However, you can have another measurement in place that tracks this which is the Resolve Time (sometimes called MTTR (Mean Time to Repair)). 

The Goal here is also to get that band-aid on as quickly as possible so you need to ensure that your Incident Management system has some sort of a knowledge base which helps your staff find the solution to commonly placed issues/questions. If they have the answer every time, then a 100% resolution at 1st contact is achievable! If not, however … it gets a bit more complicated because all of a sudden your Incident Management team becomes the customer and the team they go to is the Problem Management team. Guess what? They have a different measurement for Response Time and Resolve Time too!    

Problem Management Response Time –

Now as previously mentioned these are generally your more senior staff and as much as you’d like them to be available 24/7 unless you have an extremely large organization this is probably fairly unlikely.

So you are going to have build or determine some relevant response times based on their availability.  In addition, as these escalated issues are generally issues that cannot easily be resolved, your resolution time is going to be extended also. Pick some appropriate intervals that meet your customers SLAs.

Your main goal for this team (in addition to resolving the problem of course) is communication, communication, communication!!! They must inform your agents what the issue is, what they are doing to resolve it and when they expect to have it resolved. If they cannot provide an estimated resolution time, they MUST provide your Tier1 team with an estimated update time.