Support Help Desks – you either love them or hate them but none more so than when they are staffed by robots!
Take WHMCS for example, an industry leader when it comes to supplying a mid tear management system to hosting companies… it has decided to staff their Support Help Desk by Robots!
Now I don’t mean literally little mechanical robots buzzing around the office, and nor do I mean some high-tech wizardry or super computer manning the help desk… no, it’s worse than that.
Robots by their very nature
- CANNOT think for themselves.
- Robots are just a manifestation of their creators (or in our case, a manifestation of their employers WHMCS).
- Robots cannot take ownership of a problem (unless told to do so by their operator)
- Robots regurgitate precisely what they have been fed (shit in / shit out philosophy)
- Robots are devoid of emotion, they cannot read it nor can they empathize with it.
- are REPLACEABLE.
Non of the above attributes are desirable for a Help Desk, at least not from a clients perspective but WHMCS thinks otherwise.
Help Desks are by their very nature supposed to be a place where you can turn to in times of need, when ‘the chips are down’ and you are at your wits end with a problem. Help Desks are supposed to help people. That does not mean just trying to fob you off with some standard rhetoric, nor does it mean feeding you a pile of the proverbial BS. It does not mean replacing everything with a clean sheet and starting afresh and it doesn’t mean passing you around from support staff to support staff until you just give up.
NO WHMCS, it does not mean any of the above!
And before you jump to any conclusions WHMCS, I have done my time on a Technical Help Desk (Level I – III) and understand the operational limitations and economic pressures that a Help Desk faces BUT there ARE ways of doing things that BENEFIT clients and STILL meet your management requirements!
Stop sitting on your hands and work it out!