IT helpdesks

[raindance]

There is a piece in the newsbox (right hand side of home page) about helpdesks being flooded with "fibs" from users.  The person quoted in the newsalert suggests that helpdesks should always have remote access to computers in order to provide accurate help.

My experience is that remote access does not necessarily facilitate assistance!  My employing company has limited in-house IT help available.  It is more cost-effective for us to outsource a whole package of IT support. Recently, however, on contacting our IT support - who do have remote access - problems that I have reported have not been fixed because the IT support doesn't know how to fix those particular things.  

I'm interested in hearing about the experiences of fellow DDers.

Best wishes,

Raindance

[dettu]

Our help desk is "remote" in the sense that it's in another building a couple of miles from here. They can remote into our machines. Every time I've had this done (perhaps a dozen times in 8 years) it has been helpful and IT solved the problem, except for once when a guy from the hardware team actually had to come to my department to deal with my equipment--and the remote people determined that his visit was necessary. I'd say that in my organization, it works and saves the company money and time.

However, we are a data/communications company, so maybe our help desk is just better trained than average.

[Cathy S]

In my previous post we had remote access for the IT Helpdesk. They were a good but small helpdesk team and as they came under-resourced (company grew but helpdesk didn't) they would adopt the remote access method so that they could be working on issues and staffing the phones at the same time.  

However their favourite advice was still "Reboot your Pc and see if the problem persists"!

My current helpdesk have remote access software but I have no experience of them using it so cannot comment on its effectiveness.

I suppose it is like everything else really - a good thing in competent hands!

Cathy

Edited by cm_stephenson on 07/08/07 04:01 PM.