While You're Here

The technician at Acme went to the second floor at ten to replace a keyboard and came back at twenty to twelve. The keyboard had taken four minutes. The remaining ninety-six had been spent on a monitor that flickered 'sometimes' and a question about why the shared calendar looked different. That time also covered a colleague two desks over whose laptop had been slow since Tuesday. It covered a printer that nobody had reported because they assumed IT knew. Each of them had begun with the same three words. None of them became a ticket. The user on the fourth floor with the eleven o'clock appointment waited, as she put it in her satisfaction comment, 'for a technician who never came'.

This series is about those three words. It covers the desk-side visit and its scope, which is one ticket. It covers why that is so hard to hold when the request is made to your face. It covers capturing add-ons as tickets in thirty seconds, so the request is honoured and the schedule is not. Then comes the two-minute rule and its limits, because the two minutes that becomes twenty is the whole problem. It covers protecting the schedule, with buffers and the next appointment as the honest reason. It covers the desk-side visit done well, including asking 'anything else?' on purpose and capturing the answer. And it covers measuring add-ons, which turn out to reveal the hotspots and the deflection candidates the queue never showed.

Articles in This Series

• The Desk-Side Visit and Its Scope: One Ticket, One Visit
  The visit is for one ticket, the add-on that arrives as you stand up, and why it is hard to say no in person. Covers the cost in hours from a fictional month, and the visit card.
• Capturing Add-Ons as Tickets in Thirty Seconds
  The log-it-now habit from the phone or the user's own machine, and the linked ticket. Covers the sentence that says it is logged and gives the number, triage later, and the capture note.
• The Two-Minute Rule and Its Limits at the Desk-Side Visit
  Do it now if it is truly two minutes and log it anyway, the two minutes that becomes twenty, the rule written down, the exceptions, and the two-minute decision card.
• Protecting the Schedule: Buffers, Appointments and Backing
  The visit calendar, buffer time between visits, the next appointment as the honest reason, telling the user the constraint, the manager's backing, and the visit schedule.
• The Desk-Side Visit Done Well, From Arrival to Leaving
  Arriving prepared with the ticket read, the fix, the note written there, anything-else asked deliberately and captured rather than done, leaving on time, and the visit checklist.
• Measuring Add-Ons and What They Reveal About the Desk
  Add-on tickets per visit, the categories they fall in, the backlog they create, the users who always have one, the honest report line, and the add-on report line.

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This series is part of the QuerySolv helpdesk topic library. It covers the foundations, processes, communication, knowledge, tooling, metrics, classic ticket domains, people and strategy behind a support desk that works. The library pairs well with the software we build: QuerySolv. It is a self-hosted help desk that runs as one Windows service on your own network. It is licensed once per installation, not per agent per month.