Measuring Your HelpDesk

Often one of the more difficult things in running a help desk is measuring performance. It’s right up there with trying to find talented staff, but often doesn’t become an issue until everything else is in place.

If you’re part of a reasonably sized company, no doubt your employee reviews contain some sort of performance measurement, so everyone gets judged and maybe even rewarded. In some parts of the business, it’s fairly easy to measure an employee’s work e.g. marketing could get rated on new customers and the sales team by how many extra widgets you sold this month.

As a team offering a service, rather than a product, to their customers, the help desk team often solely gets scored on the number of phone calls or tickets they receive or close. Pretty soon these measurements will create behaviours among your staff trying to increase their performance in these metrics. Team members will go for the high volumes of the easy fixes, or calls that can get handed on to 2nd or 3rd level areas, to pump up their stats. Read more >>

You know Google has won when

Friends last Saturday night started talking about how they were using Google AdWords to help drive traffic to their old-school business websites. We’re talking a locksmith and a moving company here – not a web savvy SEO or Web 2.0 developer in site!

Discussion turned to how much they were each spending on their AdWords campaigns and both were on the low side, in fact the same amount, $30. Now that is a small amount but probably typical of those dipping their toes into web marketing for the first time. It would be interesting to see some figures from Google about what the average spend was compared to site rankings. The internet search and advertising giant didn’t get US$11 billion by ignoring their customers.

Some of the comments at the dinner table also echoed the feelings I have toward established media outlets, especialy those in the print business. The locksmith had run ads in large newspapers over the last few years but recently had been coming up dry on leads from their not inconsiderable spending.

As trade across the internet becomes more accepted and traditional business embraces the new advertising services the old media methods will struggle and die. No one wants to spend an hour searching through the classifieds when they can run a global search or visit an online auction site and find and purchase what they want within minutes.

Sellers can target a certain audience easily and then get a range of metrics on how many viewed their ad and then followed through. Further marketing can then be narrowed again to increase the quality of the investment. Well targeted ads benefit both sides, buyers see things they’re interested in and sellers and more likely to see a purchase.

So if you’ve been thinking about doing some business on the web, now is a good time to invest some time and maybe a little money. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

The New Media

Last night the Auckland region was rocked by three earthquakes which did little or no damage. They were the biggest quakes in close to 40 years in a normally stable area. All three hit after the evening TV news had aired so people were looking for news on what happened. Where did they turn to, why the Web of course.

Only a few years ago, a news event like this would have gone largely ignored by what passed as online news agencies. Last night however, the NZ Herald (large daily paper) had a story on their site within 15min and the local GeoNet site listing recent earthquakes was unavailable due to high traffic volumes.

By this morning interest in the story will have waned and the traditional paper and TV media will not be seeing that many more sales or viewers than normal. You can bet though that hits on web news sites last night went through the roof and those inconspicuous page ads started paying good money.

Those media agencies that have been slow on the uptake of what their audience wants and where they are now going for their information, need to move now before they get left behind for good.

The Cool Features of MS Class of 2007

I headed along to Microsoft’s latest “Business Value” presentation this morning on their latest products – Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007. The keynote was headed by Microsoft CFO and New Zealander Chris Liddell who, along with business journalist Rod Oram, spoke about the need for NZ companies to step out of old roles and processes, stay original and aim higher.

On show were the new abilities of messaging and enterprise communication that Office and Exchange will bring about. You’ll be able to update you calendar, clear your voice messages and respond to emails all from your mobile phone. For those in the office you can see when others are at their desks or their reasons for being away and Instant Message (IM) them with Office Communicator.

Communication blockers across business are also being worked on in the new products. With Outlook 2007 you can email a copy of your Calendar to any recipient while specifying what info they see and if it’s today’s items, this week’s or this month’s. If the two companies are joined by a Federation then you’ll also be able to use the IM and presence tools of Communicator.

Overall if you’re a Microsoft based medium to large sized business, the upgrade path for you is better and more feature packed than ever before. And honestly, this time, you might even use most of the new features rather than wondering how that guy down the hall makes the boss happy with his awesome PowerPoints.

The Best Web Organiser so Far?

Scrybe looks to be the next big thing for web-based organisers. Have a look at their pre-beta release video which shows some very cool ideas.

There’s the usual linking and moving of events in the calendar with day, week, month, year views but keep watching. How about dropping in data from Excel that actually formats itself correctly. Want to link to those documents for that 3pm meeting – no problem. It also adds in some Diigo/del.icio.us bookmarking features of it’s own so you can save all those great ideas for your Mum’s birthday from the web into the event reminder.

As mentioned at engtech there’s no show and tell of the synchronisation features yet, but I’ve signed up for a beta account. Once they can tie into Outlook and maybe Notes (we must forgive) people have a really good reason to get involved.

Kudos to engtech for the link.

Edit: I forgot the best bit. Scrybe will print out your schedules and to-do list onto a sheet of paper with fold lines that turn it into a neat little booklet. This has to be the first example of Web2.0 origami.