Download or read book Help written by Ralph Wilson and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Answering questions about software and hardware is a full-time job for hundreds of thousands of people. IBM alone has over 20,000 full-time technical support personnel. This is a book about and for the technical support industry. It describes how to set up and manage a technical support operation, covers techniques for handling support questions by phone, and explains how to estimate the cost of a technical support operation. The book includes profiles of successful technical support operations at companies such as WordPerfect Corporation.
Download or read book A Beginner s Guide To Understanding Technical Support written by Jose D. Afable and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2002 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Beginner's Guide To Understanding Technical Support is a unique guide designed for anyone wishing to venture into the field of technical support. This book will provide a basic understanding of the processes, entities, and issues within a support organization so that anyone wishing to know more about the support organization functions or wanting to pursue a career in this area receives the information they need to make their informed decision.
Download or read book Tales from the Tech Line written by David Pogue and published by Berkley Trade. This book was released on 1998 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: MacWorld columnist Dave Pogue shares the best-ever tales from computer tech-support hotlines--humorous stories which prove that technology can turn even college professors and top execs into babbling fools.
Download or read book A Guide to IT Technical Support written by Jean Andrews and published by Cengage Learning. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 1164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Master the details of IT technical support as Andrews/Dark/West's comprehensive COMPTIA A+ GUIDE TO IT TECHNICAL SUPPORT, 10E explains how to work with users as well as install, maintain, troubleshoot and network computer hardware and software. This step-by-step, highly visual, best-selling approach uses CompTIA A+ Exam objectives as a framework to prepare you for 220-1001 and 220-1002 certification exams. Each chapter covers core and advanced topics while emphasizing practical application of the most current technology, techniques and industry standards. You study the latest hardware, security, Active Directory, operational procedures, basics of scripting, virtualization, cloud computing, mobile devices and Windows 10. Lab Manuals, CourseNotes, online labs and optional MindTap online resources provide additional certification test preparation and interactive activities to prepare you for a role as an IT support technician or administrator.
Download or read book Technical Support Essentials written by Andrew Sanchez and published by Apress. This book was released on 2010-09-08 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technical Support Essentials is a book about the many facets of technical support. It attempts to provide a wide array of topics to serve as points of improvement, discussion, or simply topics that you might want to learn. The topics range from good work habits to the way technical support groups establish their own style of work. This book applies theories, models, and concepts synthesized from existing research in other fields—such as management, economics, leadership, and psychology—and connects them to technical support. The goal is to build on the work of others and allow their success to evolve the profession. The book’s broad perspective looks at proven practices, legal issues, dealing with customers, utilizing resources, and an array of other topics of interest to tech support professionals.
Download or read book Delivering World Class Technical Support written by Navtej Khandpur and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technical support is essential for any computer vendor, whether to answer application questions or to handle the problems that inevitably occur. This book will help any company develop a top-flight technical support department., offering guidelines on both organization and development. It discusses such topics as work distribution, scheduling and organization, and more.
Download or read book IT Problem Management written by Gary S. Walker and published by Prentice Hall Professional. This book was released on 2001 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preface In the past three decades, businesses have made staggering investments in technology to increase their productivity and efficiency. The technological infrastructure of these companies has become increasingly sophisticated and complex. Most companies today are extremely dependent on their technological infrastructure. Operating without it is like trying to run a business without a telephone or electricity. Businesses depend on their technology at least as much as, perhaps more than, any other utility. However, unlike the telephone and electric industries, technology has not had the benefit of 100 + years to mature under the control of a handful of companies. Thousands of companies contribute to technology, each doing whatever they think will sell the best. Extreme and rapid innovation is the rule, not the exception. Change is the rule, not the exception. The resulting complexity has posed a new challenge for companies: how to realize the potential and anticipated benefits of the investments in an environment of constant change. Businesses are so reliant on technology that they need it to operate as reliably, consistently, and universally as the telephone and electricity. We are a long way from achieving that level of service. Businesses face rising costs because of constant failures that result in lost productivity. It is very difficult and expensive to find the resources with the expertise to manage and repair their infrastructures. It is extremely difficult and expensive to keep those resources trained to manage a constantly evolving environment. But guess what. There is no choice but to invest in technology, because it has to be done. Business cannot stop investing in technology or they will be crushed by the competition. So what have they done? They have standardized to limit the diversity, the expertise required, and the problems associated with diversity. They have striven to make the infrastructure as reliable as the telephone and to keep employees productive. And they have created a team that has the skills, the facilities, and the charter to fix existing problems and reduce future problems. That team is the service center, and this book shares how the best of those teams are doing just that. Technology impacts more than just a business's internal operations. What about the company's customers? They often need support, as well. More companies are realizing the value of providing quality service to its customers. Some studies have indicated that keeping a customer costs one-tenth the price of getting a new one, while the return business from satisfied customers count for substantially more than one-tenth of a company's revenue. It makes good economic sense to spend money on keeping existing clients satisfied. For many companies, that means providing customers with quality support for the products and services they purchase. So who in the company provides that service? You guessed it—the service center. What is a service center? It is an organization whose charter and mission are to provide support services to internal or external customers, or to both. It is a concentration of expertise, processes, and tools dedicated to taking customers' requests and fulfilling them in a timely and cost-effective manner, leaving the customer delighted with the experience. A service center has a defined range of service offerings, from fixing problems to providing value-added services, and everything in between. This book is intended to help a company set up that service center and deliver those services cost effectively. The book focuses on structuring the organization and building the processes to move service requests efficiently and effectively through the organization to deliver quality service to the customer. It discusses the pitfalls that afflict many service centers and offers techniques and solutions to avoid those pitfalls. The book discusses the tools available to help a service center manage its business and deliver high quality cost-effective services to customers. The traditional help desk is still around, but many have evolved into service centers. As more businesses are faced with increasing technology costsand increasing pressure to be productive and efficient internally—while delighting external customers—many more help desks will be forced to evolve. For a well-run help desk, the evolutionis natural and not overly difficult. Most help desks were originally designed to provide one type of service, technical support. Help desks traditionally helped customers by fixing their problems and answering their questions. The help desk concentrated technical expertise, problem management processes, and tools to track and resolve customer problems, answer customer questions, and deliver that support as cost effectively as possible. Many help desks have done this quite successfully, and many have not. As their companies reengineer and look to streamline operations, many company executives have asked the simple question, "Today, you provide one type of service—technical support. How hard would it be to add additional services?" It's a fair question, because the help desk already takes service requests, tracks them, makes delivery commitments to customers, delivers the services, and charges the customers. The organization, the processes, the tools are in place. The evolution usually starts small, with simple, technology-related, value-added services, such as ordering PCs. You need a PC, contact the help desk. They'll figure out what you need, order it, track the order, install it when it arrives, and then support you if you have any questions. Voila, the help desk is now providing value-added services. Since you are ordering the equipment and maintaining and fixing it all the time, how about keeping track of it? No one else does. Again, voila, you're providing a value-added asset management service. Since you have all of that valuable information, can you report on it quarterly to the insurance and risk anagement department and the finance and accounting group? Yep, another—value added service. Hey, you guys are pretty good at this stuff. We need computer training. Can you make arrangements for that and then handle the scheduling? Its happened. You are no longer just a help desk—you are a service center, offering both traditional help desk support and value-added services to your customers. This goes along for a while, and you tweak the processes and improve your delivery capability. Then, someone in the company gets the idea that a single point of contact for many internal services would be handy, and since you're already capable of handling value-added servicesand you do it so well, you should consider handling many more. That certainly sounds reasonable. For example, how about a service for new employees. Instead of the HR department contacting the telecom department, the help desk, and the facilities department every time a new employee is hired, why don't they just contact the service center and let them coordinate the rest. Like magic, you've added a service called New Employee Setup, or maybe even better, Amaze the New Employee. You gather the vital information—her name, who she works for, when she starts, what budget to charge, where she'll be sitting. You order her PC, you contact telecom to set up her phone and voice mailbox, and you contact facilities to set up her workspace. Then, you notify security and set up her appointment to get a badge, you schedule her into the next orientation class, and you schedule her in the next "PC and Networking in Our Company" class. Finally, you generate the standard welcome-on-board letter that tells her the classes she is scheduled for and where they are located. You have standard attachments that explain how to use the phone and how to log on to the PC, and most importantly, how to reach the service center. You email the package to HR, who is merely awaiting her arrival, secure in the knowledge that all is well, everything is ready, and that the new employee will be duly impressed with her new company. Just as you do with the problems you handle, you follow up on this service to make sure the work is done on time. Now your follow-up includes telecom and facilities, who essentially act like any other tier 2 group. Instead of generating a trouble ticket, you generate a tracking ticket, which is associated with another new type of ticket, a work order. One work order is sent to telecom and another to facilities. The new tracking ticket looks amazingly similar to a trouble ticket. It has the same contact information—the customer name and location, the desired delivery date, the name of the agent who took the order, when the order was placed, the current status, and who else is involved. Work order tickets really aren't much different than a traditional trouble ticket to dispatch, for example, a hardware support technician that includes information on where to go, what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, who is handling it, its current status and priority, and so on. The work order ticket even goes into a queue, just like a problem ticket dispatched to any tier 2 support group. And just as with trouble tickets, you have processes and tools in place to escalate the tracking and work order tickets, and to send notifications if there is a problem or if more work to be done. The entire process is, logically, very similar to managing problems. The information must be tracked, people are assigned to do the work, the work is prioritized, time commitments are in place, processes are in place to handle work that can't be done in the agreed upon time frame, additional levels of expertise are available to handle difficulties. Perhaps most importantly, it is all initiated, tracked, and closed centrally. Many help desks resist this evolution. If their house is not in order and they are struggling to handle technical support, they should resist. Get the technical support in order first. Work on your problem management processes and take advantage of your existing tools. When your problem management processes are working, they'll work just as well for other value-added services. That is the secret. If you can make and meet time commitmentsfor technical support to customers, you can easily add new value-added services to your repertoire. Value-added services are like the simplest, most common, recurring problems your customers call about. They're easy because the request is common, so everyone is familiar with it. The solution is known; its predefined. Processes to deliver the solution are already in place. Processes to deal with unexpected complications are already defined and in use. Simple. You have the tools, the people, the processes, the organization, and the experience. Overview This book was written because problem management is one of the most important processes for any IT organization. Yet, of the hundreds of companies we have worked with, it is most often not done well. It seems that many companies consider problem management only as an afterthought, a necessary evil, overhead, or worse, all of the above. So what is problem management? Problem management is a formal set of processes designed and implemented to quickly and efficiently resolve problems and questions. Those problems and questions come from customers, both internal and external. Why is problem management important? Because how well you do at resolving those problems and questions determines how your customers perceive you. Further, how you provide those services can make an enormous difference in your overall costs—not only your costs, but also the costs your customers incur. Do a poor job on your problem management processes and your customers will think ill of you. Internal customers can be the most vicious, because they know who to complain to. They also complain to each other, and before you know it, the entire company believes you to be incompetent, at least as far as problem management goes. Worse, that attitude can easily fail over to the entire IT department. Let's face it—most of the IT department's exposure is through the problem management function (the help desk) and that is where your reputation will be made or broken. It isn't hard to justify spending to improve problem management when you calculate the number of hours of internal downtime and the average cost per hour the company absorbs for that downtime. Run the numbers and see for yourself. External customers can be less vicious on a personal level, but from the business perspective, their impression is even more important. If they don't like the way you handle problems, they may complain, but worse, they will most certainly vote with their dollar by taking it elsewhere—and will probably tell everyone they know to do the same. Your company worked hard and spent significant dollars to win that customer. To lose them because you provided poor service is an enormous waste. What will it cost you to win them back? Can you win them back? Can you ever win their friends and associates? Many studies have found that it is much cheaper to keep a customer than to win a new one. If your company hasn't seen this light yet, you need to convince them. This book was written to tell you what you can and should consider doing to improve your problem management processes. It is based on experience gained at many different sites and focuses on improving service delivery and efficiency. It's true—you can do it better and cheaper. You may have to spend some capital up front, but a standard project cost/benefit analysis will show that you can recoup those costs quickly, and in some cases, can generate significant dollars. This book was written for CIOs, vice presidents, help desk and service center managers, and the senior-level internal customers of the problem management department—anyone who can influence the problem management function and wants to understand more about what can and should be done to improve performance. I appreciate any feedback you wish to provide. You can reach me at [email protected]@hotmail.com. Best of luck to you, Gary Walker
Download or read book It Technical Support Troubleshooting Pocket Guide written by Jean Andrews and published by Cengage Learning. This book was released on 2016-10-12 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When working on a PC, laptop or mobile device, you'll want to keep this handy PC Troubleshooting Pocket Guide by your side. Jean Andrews provides clear, complete explanations to make technical topics easy to understand. The PC Troubleshooting Pocket Guide will help individuals diagnose computer problems with ease and speed. This portable, compact volume provides essential diagnostic and troubleshooting information, and is an essential tool for anyone who needs to find computer information quickly and efficiently.
Download or read book Tech Support 101 written by Andrew Brown and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tech support 101 book is written to provide a basic understanding on how to troubleshoot in the information technology world. The book provides hardware, and software guidance. The book also provides screenshots, and flowcharts to provide a better understanding for the reader.
Download or read book Tech Support 101 written by Andrew M Brown and published by . This book was released on 2020-06-13 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tech support 101 book is written to provide a basic understanding on how to troubleshoot in the information technology world. The book provides hardware, and software guidance. The book also provides screenshots, and flowcharts to provide a better understanding for the reader.
Download or read book Technical Support written by Rachel King and published by Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2014-12-15 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Think you want to go into the technology industry? Many technology professionals jump-start their careers in technical support. Whether youre looking to join a big company or a small start-up, learn exactly what it takes to get that perfect job!
Download or read book The Complete Guide to Customer Support written by Joe Fleischer and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2002-01-04 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's support operations face greater responsibilities than the help desks of the 1990s. That's because customers expect 24x7 assistance on whatever channel they choose - no matter what type of products and/or services they buy. The Complete Guide t
Download or read book A Guide to Computer User Support for Help Desk Support Specialists written by Fred Beisse and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A standard for help desk professionals and those considering becoming support professionals, this text focuses on key information for user support professionals, including decision making, communicating successfully with a client, determining the client's specific needs, and writing for the end user. This text has been updated to reflect the latest in support industry trends, especially the use of Web and email-based support. For those considering entering the field, alternate career paths for user-support workers are described. This edition has retained and updated the CloseUp feature, which details real-life scenarios of working professionals and issues in the workplace. With balanced coverage of both people skills and technical skills, this book is an excellent resource for those in the technical-support field.
Download or read book Careers in Computer Support written by Jeri Freedman and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2013-07-15 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the importance of computers and mobile devices in every business and industry, the demand for computer support professionals is greater than ever before. As a result, those with strong skills in computer support have a relatively secure career path and the ability to apply their knowledge in a wide variety of environments. This title presents a number of different careers in computer support, including their typical work settings, responsibilities, and demands. Information is provided on education and training--starting with preparation at the high school level--and practical advice is given on how to land a job.
Download or read book IT Help Desk written by S. James and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Your Complete Guide To The IT Help DeskYour Blueprint To Service Success, Mastering User Support & Troubleshooting Like A GeniusAre You Ready To Learn All About Working An IT Help Desk? If So You've Come To The Right Place...Here's A Preview Of What This Book Contains...An Explanation Of What The IT Help Desk Actually IsHow To Improve Communication Skills Like A ProHandling Difficult Calls & Situations The Right Way (Must Read!)Best Words & Best Practices For The IT Help DeskThe Six Step Problem Solving Model You NEED To ImplementComputer Troubleshooting From The Very BasicsNo Video? Here's What To Do...Troubleshooting No POST No Boot IssuesHow To Troubleshoot A Freezing Computer CorrectlyThe Downlow On Disk ErrorsKeyboard And Mouse IssuesYour Customer Support ToolsAnd Much, Much More!
Download or read book PC Desktop Technician Desktop Support Specialist It Service Desk Technician Help Desk Analyst Just in Time Revision Guide for Success at Any Ict S written by Kumar and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2016-12-03 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's for these job interviews: IT Support Specialist IT Service Desk Technician PC Support/Technical Support/IT Support IT Service Desk Technician Desktop Support Specialist Why this book: It will help you to convey powerful and useful information about various aspects of IT Support Specialist job to the employer successfully. It gives readers the most important practical job related information for supporting various aspects of ICT (Information & Communication Technology): ICT infrastructure Support (e.g. desktops, laptops, printers, scanners, connectivity, software, e-mail, etc.) Desktop Support (hardware, software, OS, peripherals) Troubleshooting PC hardware and software problems Non Technical/ Personal/ HR interview Try to be in parking lot an hour before the interview and use this time to read over this E-book. It has been well written to make it a very quick read. Practicing with this interview questions and answers in the mirror will help with your replies to questions and pass with flying colors. It also covers non-technical, HR and Personnel questions in brief. Good Luck, Kumar
Download or read book How to Manage the IT Helpdesk written by Noel Bruton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The result of over 15 years of practical experience, this volume offers tools for measuring IT help desk productivity and features ten steps for successful support, demonstrating successes and failures through real life case studies.
