5 minutes

Understanding The Different Levels of Help Desk Support

Published

Share this Article:

Our content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click links to our partners. Learn more in our Editorial & Advertising Policy.

IT help desk talking on the phone" Hello, IT, Have you tried turning it off and on again? "

If there’s something strange in your neighborhood? If there’s something weird and it doesn’t look good? If you’re seeing things running through your head? An invisible man sleeping in your bed? Who you gonna call? … What if you need to reset your password, the printer doesn’t work, you can’t update adobe reader, you can’t access the network or your computer freezes? Who are you gonna call? Ghostbusters?! No! Thanks, Ray Parker, but no you gonna call the help desk.

As you may already know, and I hope that you know, the help desk is a critical part of customer service. These are the superheroes that fix the problems for your customers who are probably extremely frustrated. Resolving your customer’s issues, ASAP, greatly increases customer satisfaction, which, in turn, positively impacts future sales. To put it another way, having an excellent help desk service impacts the life of your company. Typically reached via a toll-free phone number, help desk support is now using the web to support customers via chat tools and social networks.

Usually, companies starting out using a single-tier customer support system: a single point of contact to handle queries or solve problems. However, as a company grows they tend to need more than just a single-tier model. This means they move to a multi-tiered support system.

For instance, if you are selling project management software to businesses, you could get queries like, I forget my username and password, what do I do? Or, how do I deal with a bug that is preventing me from time tracking on an iPad? In the latter case, you need experts to solve this bug issue. While in the first case, a less complex query about usernames and passwords would not require a programmer. When you have proper tiers set up in your help desk support, it helps allocate support resources to meet customer needs.

Featured Partners

What are the Different Help Desk Tiers?  

Tier – I Support

This is the basic level of customer support. The customer representative is a generalist with a broad understanding of the product and may not understand the inner workings. In this case, they would identify a customer’s needs and provide tips on how to manage a problem.

Typically, these solutions are in a FAQ or a knowledge base. Employees at this tier use a knowledge base in a majority of customer calls. Tier-1 support usually provides a 24-hour service and is outsourced to a 3rd party. When a tier-1 support employee is not able to resolve the issue, they classify the problem and pass it on to the appropriate tier-2 employee. At this point, an issue tracking ticket is issued to the customer.

Tier – II Support

Tier-II support involves technical knowledge and is staffed by technicians who have troubleshooting capabilities beyond the tier-1 employees. The tier-II help desk employees are staffed by either the company involved or outsourced to a 3rd party. The technicians tend to have a specialization and will determine which specialization best matches the customer’s needs before helping him. If their technical specialization is one that can help the customer, the tech then determines whether this problem is a new issue or an existing one. Advanced diagnostic tools and data analysis may be done at this point.

If the issue is an existing one, the tier-II specialist then finds out if there is a solution or a workaround in the database. The customer is then told how to fix their problem. However, in some cases, there might be no solution as it’s an open bug. In that case, the tier-II desk adds an entry to the bug list. Then, depending on the number of instances where customers are experiencing the same problem, the help desk could ask the developers to fix the bug.

If a customer experiences a new issue, further analysis has to be done to see if it can be dealt with. The help desk employee would then explain to the customer how to fix their issue. However, if the tech cannot fix the problem at this tier, the problem goes to tier-III. At this tier, the problem is assigned to a developer at the company responsible for the product.

Tier – III Support

Tier-III requires a person who has specialized skills over and above the work the techs do in tier II. This support is usually provided by the specialists involved in product development. They deal with complex issues. To solve the problem, they will collect as much data as possible from the employees at tiers 1 and 2.

In my previous job as a developer at Microsoft in the Windows OS team, I used to get the harder bugs in the operating system passed on from support personnel around the world and from the crash dumps you report when an application stops working. Sometimes fixing the problem involves a deeper analysis of the operating system. Fixing the problem may require a Windows update.

Tier – IV Support

This tier only exists in a multiple vendor case. For instance, if you’re an app developer and the issue involves fixing the problem on an OS mobile level provided by another company, you simply request support from the other company.

Sign up for our emails and be the first to see helpful how-tos, insider tips & tricks, and a collection of templates & tools. Subscribe Now

Featured Partners

Subscribe to Project Management Insider for best practices, reviews and resources.

Balaji Viswanathan Avatar

Get the Newsletter

Subscribe to Project Management Insider for best practices, reviews and resources.