Your IT Help Desk – How to Choose the Best Staff

Your company’s IT help desk will often be the primary contact many customers have with your business. As such, it’s essential that you choose the right staff. Most individuals will have plenty of tales to tell about poor IT support, and it’s very important that they don’t begin to tell them about your IT company.

Here are three tips to help you choose the best staff for your IT help desk:

1. Focus on communication. Great communication skills are (arguably) more important than technical abilities for IT help desk staff. Good help desk people give off an air of knowledge that inspires confidence. The last thing you want is an IT help desk staff member who sounds vague.

2. Look for determination. The IT help desk is no place for those who will try to “pass the buck.” You need staff that convinces you they will commit to a “first-time fix,” rather than seeking the first opportunity to escalate or pass on a call.

3. Examine technical skills. Much of the technical knowledge needed by help desk staff falls into the “super user” category. Look for staff who are as competent with Word templates and Excel worksheets as they are with doing server tweaks and resetting passwords. Often, the things they need to fix aren’t especially technical, so this “expert user” knowledge will come in very useful.

What do you look for when you recruit IT help desk staff? Let us know in the Comments box below. 

And to follow through on the tips introduced in this short article, especially if your help desk also supports SaaS and IaaS, be sure to enroll now in our free 7-day eCourse: Go-to-Market Strategy 101 for B2B SaaS Startups and Scaleups.