Redirecting People to the Queue Without Alienating Them

Wednesday, 11:05, at Acme. Nadia has been told, in Monday's team meeting, that the desk is "moving people to the form". She is trying it for the first time on Greg from sales, who has walked over to say his second screen has stopped being recognised. "Could you put that in a ticket for me?" she says, in the voice she uses for policy. Greg's face does a small thing. He does not argue. He says "sure", goes back to his desk, and does not put it in a ticket. The last time he used the form, in the spring, he got an automatic e-mail and then nothing for nine days. He plugs the screen into a different port, which works, and tells the three people around him that IT has started sending people away. Nadia, meanwhile, feels she has done what she was told. The desk has lost a user and gained nothing, and both of them think the morning went fine.

A redirect is the sentence that moves a person's next request into the queue. It is said after this request has been handled rather than instead of handling it. Redirecting without alienating people means saying it so that the person hears a better route rather than a closed door. The previous articles in this series dealt with the hallway request itself, the direct message and the window. This one is about the conversation that changes where people go next time, and about the five people with whom that conversation is hardest. It is part of our The Walk-Up & Drive-By Culture series.

It covers what a redirect is and the one rule about when it happens, and tone, and the sentence that does not sound like a door. Next come the why, explained once and kindly, the manager who walks up, and the executive. Then come the user who tried the portal and it failed, the colleague who is also a friend, and the person who walks up every day. A short war story and the redirect reply set to copy come last, in that order.

A Redirect Happens After, Never Instead

The redirect is the last sentence of a handled request, and if the request has not been handled, the redirect is a brush-off with better manners. Greg's screen was a request. "Could you put that in a ticket" was offered instead of handling it. The result was a user who now believes the desk sends people away. The correct order, from the hallway request handled well, is yes, logged now, here is your number, and only then, "next time, the form gets to us faster than finding me." The redirect rides on the back of a request that just went well. On its own it has nothing to ride on.

The rule has a corollary that technicians find hard. The redirect is never said to a person whose last experience of the queue was bad. If Greg had been told "next time, use the form" with his nine-day silence still fresh, the sentence would have been an insult, however kindly meant. The queue has to have earned the right to be recommended, and it earns it one handled request at a time. A desk that starts redirecting on Monday because the meeting said so, before it has fixed the silence, is asking people to trust something that just let them down. They will decline, politely, by going to the colleague who knows about computers.

So the redirect is a slow instrument. It is said to each person once, after a good experience, in words they can hear, and then it is left to work. It does not need repeating to the same person weekly. It needs the queue to keep being good. The desk that gets this right spends its effort on handling requests well and its words sparingly. The desk that gets it wrong says "please use the form" forty times a day and wonders why the form is quiet.

Tone: The Sentence That Does Not Sound Like a Door

The same redirect can be said as a door closing or as a shortcut being shared. And the difference is almost entirely in the first word and the reason given. "You need to put that in a ticket" is a door. "The form gets to us faster than finding me, and you'll have a number straight away" is a shortcut. The first is about what the requester must do. The second is about what the requester gets. People will walk a long way for a shortcut and not an inch for a rule. Writing the sentence so that it sounds like a person offering a shortcut, rather than a notice, is the skill in Writing Like a Person, Not a Policy. The redirect is that skill spoken aloud.

Three words never belong in a redirect: "policy", "process" and "supposed". "You're supposed to use the form" tells the person they have done something wrong, which they have not. They asked a colleague for help. "Our process is" tells them the desk has a rulebook and they are on the wrong page of it. Say instead what the route does for them. It gets a number. It gets picked up by whoever is free rather than waiting for one person. It survives the technician being on leave. Every one of those is true, and every one is about the requester.

The tone is first person and specific. "I'll log this one; next time the form is quicker than finding me" is a person talking. "Requests should be submitted through the portal" is a sign talking, and a sign nobody wanted. Say it the way you would to a friend who had just asked you something at lunch. That is the case this article comes to later. It turns out to be the model for all the others. (It is also the sentence the technician is least likely to say to a friend, which tells you something.)

The Why, Explained Once and Kindly

People accept a redirect when they understand what it is for, and they understand it when the reason is about them or about fairness, not about the desk. Three reasons land. The number: "you'll get a ticket number, so you can chase it or forward it without finding me." The cover: "if I'm off, anyone on the desk can pick it up, which they can't if it's in my head." The fairness: "the warehouse and the people working from home can't walk over, so the form is how we serve everyone in order." Any one of those, said once, does the job. All three at once is a lecture.

Three reasons do not land, and technicians reach for them because they are the reasons the desk cares about. "It's our process" is not a reason. It is a restatement. "We need the numbers" tells the requester they are being asked to do paperwork for the desk's benefit, which is exactly how it will be repeated in the kitchen. "My manager wants us to" makes the technician a messenger and the manager a villain. It invites the requester to take it up with the manager, which some will. The desk's reasons are real. They are just not the requester's reasons, and the redirect is said in the requester's language.

Say the why once per person. The first redirect carries the reason. The second, weeks later if the person walks up again, is a reminder of five words: "logged it; form's quicker next time." The third time, if there is one, is not a redirect problem but a pattern, and patterns are handled later in this article. A technician who explains the fairness of the queue to the same person every Tuesday has stopped redirecting and started nagging. Nagging has never once changed where anyone goes.

The Manager Who Walks Up

A manager's walk-up gets the same handling as anyone's, and the redirect is said with one addition, which is about their team. The request is logged, the number is given, and the ten-minute fix is made if there is one. Then the redirect is: "if your team send theirs to the form too, they'll each get a number and we can see the whole department's requests together." Most managers like that sentence, because it offers them something: visibility of what their team is asking for. A manager who sends their team to the form is worth twenty redirects to individuals, and the sentence costs nothing.

The manager who walks up on behalf of the team is a different and welcome case. The handling is to log the request with the actual affected people on it. "Three of my people can't print" is logged as a ticket, or three linked ones, with the three names. That way, each of them gets the updates rather than the manager relaying them. Say so: "I'll put the three of them on it so they get the updates directly." The manager has been saved a job, the three people have a number each, and nobody has been sent anywhere.

The manager who objects to the redirect, or who says their team will keep coming to the desk in person because it is faster, is not a conversation for the technician. The technician logs the request, gives the number, says the one sentence, and reports the objection to the desk lead. The desk lead has the conversation manager to manager, with the census numbers from the first article in this series. Most of those conversations end with the manager agreeing once they see what the hallway costs their own team in waiting time. The occasional one that does not is an exception the desk lead can grant, time-boxed, and record. The shape of that upward conversation, when the person with authority wants the rule bent, is in Saying No Upward. The walk-up rule is a small instance of it.

The Executive

The executive is the one person this article does not redirect at the lift, because executive support has its own design and the redirect belongs inside it. An executive who stops a technician in the corridor gets the request logged and a number, exactly as anyone does. Then nothing further is said in the corridor, because the route for executive requests is almost always the executive's assistant. The conversation about routes happens with the assistant, calmly, at a desk. What executive support is and is not, and why the desk must not grow a shadow service level for people with corner offices, is in What VIP Support Is and Is Not. The walk-up version is simply that the executive's request becomes a ticket like everyone else's. The redirect is delivered to the person who actually raises the executive's requests.

Working through the assistant is the redirect for executives, and it is a good one, because the assistant wants a route that works as much as the desk does. "When Dana needs something, the fastest way to us is the form or the desk mailbox, and you'll get the number to chase with" is a sentence an assistant will act on. It gives them a handle on a request they would otherwise be chasing by walking the floor. The detail of that relationship, and why the assistant is the desk's best ally in the executive suite, is in Working Through the Executive Assistant. The technician in the corridor logs the request, says "I'll make sure Dana's office has the number", and leaves the routing to the people whose job it is.

Two things are not done with an executive walk-up. It is not fixed on the spot at the expense of a live incident. It is not left unlogged because the person was important. The first produces a desk whose priorities are set by seniority, which is unfair to everyone and eventually to the executive too. The second produces the invisible backlog with the most expensive person in the building waiting at the end of it. Log it, give the number, route the routing to the assistant, and let the priority be set at triage by impact, where it belongs.

The User Who Tried the Portal and It Failed

The person who says "I tried the form and it didn't work" is never redirected to the form. They are the one person in this article who gets an apology before anything else. "I'm sorry, that shouldn't have happened. Let me log this one for you now, and I'll open a second ticket about the form so we can find out what went wrong." Two tickets: theirs, with a number, and the desk's, about the portal. The second one is the important one, because a portal that failed Greg has failed others who did not come and say so. The ways a first visit to the portal goes wrong, and how to make it succeed, are the subject of Making the First Visit Succeed.

"It didn't work" has three usual meanings, and the technician asks which, because the fix differs. It would not submit, which is a bug or a required field nobody could find. It submitted and nothing happened, which is the black hole, and the desk's own failure to answer. Or the person could not find the right category, gave up and walked over, which is a form design problem. Each of those is a ticket for the desk, and each is a reason the redirect would have been wrong today. Ask once, kindly, log the answer in the second ticket, and move on. The requester is not being interrogated. The form is.

Then, and this is the part that rebuilds trust, close the loop with the person when the portal problem is fixed. "The form had a required field hidden under the browser's toolbar at your screen size. It's fixed, and if you ever try it again and it misbehaves, tell me and I'll want to know." A person who has been told what went wrong and that it was the desk's fault, not theirs, will try the form again. A person who was redirected to a form that failed them will not, and will say so to the three people around them. That is how a desk acquires a reputation it cannot see.

The Colleague Who Is Also a Friend

The friend who asks at lunch is the hardest redirect, because the request arrives as a favour and a ticket number feels like a refusal of the friendship. It is not, and the sentence that shows it is not is "I'll log it so I actually do it." That sentence is true, it is self-deprecating, and it puts the ticket on the technician's side of the table. The number is not a hoop for the friend. It is the technician's memory, which the friend knows from experience is not what it was. Friends accept that sentence. They have watched the technician forget to bring the book back for three months.

The friend is also where the desk-level rule earns its keep. A technician who personally decides to make their friends use the form is a bad friend. A technician whose desk has a rule that everything is logged is just doing the job, and can say so with a shrug. "We log everything now, it's a desk thing, it means someone else can pick it up if I'm off" is a sentence that blames no one and nothing except a reasonable rule. The desk should make that rule and write it down, for this reason among others. That way, no technician ever has to defend the queue as a personal preference to someone they like.

Do not, with a friend, skip the logging because it feels awkward. The friend's unlogged request is the one most likely to be forgotten, because it was asked over a sandwich and not at a desk. The friend is the person least likely to chase it, because chasing a friend about a favour is awkward too. The result is the friend quietly concluding that the technician did not care, which is the opposite of what happened. Log it in front of them, on the phone, with "there, now I can't forget", and the friendship and the ticket both survive. The unlogged favour is where friendships go to be misunderstood.

The Person Who Walks Up Every Day

The person who walks up daily is a pattern, not a moment, and the redirect is the wrong tool for a pattern. Three redirects to the same person have not worked, and a fourth will not. Something else is going on, and it is one of three things. The queue has failed them before and they do not trust it, which is fixed by the double ticket above and a good experience, not by words. The form is hard for them, because of eyesight, language, a screen reader or a job with no desk. That is fixed by giving them a route that works for them, usually the phone or the window, and saying it is theirs. Or they simply prefer people, which is the case where the window, with its hours and its chair, was built.

Ask which, kindly and once, away from the corridor. "You come and find me most days, which is fine, but I want to make sure the form isn't failing you. Is there something about it that doesn't work?" People answer that question honestly when it is asked as a question. Then give them the route that fits: the window at its hours, the phone number, or the form with the field they could not find now explained. The table below has the common cases, because the daily walker is nearly always one of them.

None of these is solved by saying "please use the form" more firmly. The daily walker is giving the desk information about a route that is not working for them. And the redirect that works is the one that listens first. A desk that reads the pattern will often find that the daily walker becomes the department's best advocate for the queue, because they are the one person who was finally asked why.

A Short War Story: The Form Nobody Could Find at Calderwood College

Calderwood College, a further education college with a four-person desk, decided one September to move its staff from walk-ups to the portal. The desk lead, Fergus, briefed the team to redirect every walk-up to the form, firmly, from the first day of term. By the end of the second week the walk-ups had fallen by about half and the form submissions had not risen at all. Fergus read that as success until a lecturer called Aoife spoke to him in the car park. She told him the staff room had decided IT was "closed" and had started asking a technician in the library who was not on the desk. Fergus asked her, as an afterthought, whether she had tried the form. She said she had, three times, and that it asked for a "cost centre code" that no lecturer had ever been given. So she had given up, and so had everyone she knew. The field had been added by finance the previous year for equipment requests and made mandatory on every form by mistake. The desk removed it in an afternoon and opened a ticket for every person Aoife could name. The desk apologised in the next staff bulletin and spent the following half-term redirecting nobody at all while the queue did its job in public. By the spring the form was the busiest route the desk had. The cost of the fortnight was a term's worth of goodwill and a librarian who was quietly doing the desk's job. It also included a lesson Fergus wrote on the whiteboard and left there: never send anyone to a door you have not walked through yourself.

The Redirect Reply Set

The set below has six replies. They include the standard redirect for after a handled request and the five-word reminder for the second time. There is one each for the manager, the executive's office, the portal failure and the friend. Every one of them assumes the request has already been logged and the number given. None of them is a first sentence. Keep the words close to these, because a redirect that sounds the same from every technician is a desk with a route. One that sounds different from each is four people with opinions.

THE REDIRECT REPLY SET — SAID AFTER THE REQUEST IS LOGGED AND THE NUMBER GIVEN
Form: ______________________   Mailbox: ____________@example.com   Window hours: ________________

1. THE STANDARD REDIRECT (first time, after a good experience)
   "That's logged, your number's ______. Next time, the form at ______________ gets to us
    faster than finding me, and you'll have the number straight away [so anyone on the
    desk can pick it up if I'm off / so you can chase it without hunting for me]."
   One reason only. Never "policy", "process" or "supposed to".

2. THE REMINDER (second time, weeks later)
   "Logged it, number ______. Form's quicker next time."
   Third time: not a redirect; ask what is not working for them.

3. THE MANAGER
   "Logged, number ______. If your team send theirs to the form too, they'll each get a
    number and you'll be able to see the whole department's requests in one place."
   On behalf of others: "I'll put the three of them on the ticket so they get the updates directly."
   Objection: log it, say the one sentence, and tell the desk lead the same day.

4. THE EXECUTIVE'S OFFICE (said to the assistant, at a desk, not at the lift)
   "When ______ needs something, the fastest route to us is the form or ____________@example.com;
    you'll get the number to chase with, and it's picked up by whoever is free rather than
    waiting for one person."
   In the corridor: log it, give the number, say nothing about routes.

5. THE PORTAL FAILURE
   "I'm sorry, that shouldn't have happened. I'm logging this one for you now, number ______,
    and opening a second ticket about the form so we can find out what went wrong.
    Which bit failed: it wouldn't submit, it submitted and you heard nothing, or you
    couldn't find the right option?"
   [ ] Second ticket opened   [ ] Loop closed with the person when the form is fixed

6. THE FRIEND
   "I'll log it so I actually do it. There, number ______, now I can't forget."
   If asked why: "We log everything now, it's a desk thing; it means someone else can pick
    it up if I'm away."

Nadia found Greg the next morning, which took some nerve. She logged a ticket with his name on it for the screen that had stopped being recognised. She found the loose port in four minutes at his desk and said the standard redirect with the cover reason. Greg's team had a technician on leave that month and the sentence happened to be true. Greg used the form the following week. The three people around him noticed, which is how the form got its next three users. That is how, slowly, a desk that had been "sending people away" became one that gave you a number before you had finished asking.

Frequently Asked Questions