A Day In The Life

My day starts at different times because we have a rota that gives cover for our clients between 8am and 6pm but I’m pretty good at getting up in the morning so I like the 8am until 4.30pm day. When you start early the phones tend to be pretty quiet for the first 30 minutes and that allows me to review all of the alerts from our server monitoring tools, this could be backups that appear not to have run properly or other alerts regarding the server or its performance. If the alerts need further work I log the calls straight onto our Helpdesk system so one of the team can begin work on them. I also review the support mailbox to see if any issues have been reported overnight from our clients and again log these onto the system so that we can start to investigate the issue.

The other really enjoyable aspect is the wide range of clients we support; our team here support over 80 clients which means different types of businesses, different types of systems and different people to help. It’s amazing how quickly you get to know the people who work at our clients and build relationships with them, and how much we learn about the business and the users. I think it helps when users call that they get through to someone they have spoken to before and have a relationship with, its makes things less stressful for them as they know and trust us to look after them, I think some of them enjoy a little chat while I’m fixing their problem. Getting to meet the people face to face also helps, so all of the Helpdesk team make client visits, obviously the bulk of our job is on the phone helping clients, but making a couple of visits a month is really worthwhile, it makes such as different to the relationship I have with that client and the users.

Before I leave I make sure every one of my calls is updated so that if someone else needs to pick the issue up, they know exactly where I’m up to. I can then also discuss with my Team Leader what priorities I have for the morning as I’ll be first in. Hopefully I can leave knowing I’ve made a difference to the clients who called in and made their day a little bit easier.