First Hand Experience To 1st Line Support

I’ve been at PCS for about half a year now and I’ve already learned so much. If someone asked me what my definition of IT managed services was before I started- I’d probably just look at them blankly. Although a lot of IT lingo still confuses me, I’m now far more clued-up on things that I never even considered learning about before. Here at PCS all the Service Desk team are 3^rd line qualified. If you’re not well-versed in IT then you’re probably thinking ‘what does that mean?’ Well it means a lot. It’s the difference between a painless phone call and being stuck on the phone for an hour (or more).

 

Before I start my semi-rant, let me just give you the brief differences between first, second and third line support. (apologies if you’re not a novice like me).

• 1st line support – General help desk. ‘Switch is off and on again’.

• 2nd line support – Normally a remote team with more specific knowledge.

• 3rd line support – They’ll get to the root of the problem, if not you’ll get onsite assistance.

I’m sure everyone has had their own soul-destroying experiences on the phone to a 1st line support team member. It’s repetitive, it’s frustrating and in my opinion, it’s a waste of resource. Unless you have a ‘turn it off and on-again issue’, 1st line engineers are not likely to get to the bottom of a technical issue.

I’m not knocking 1st line support, I’m sure it isn’t all bad and I’m not saying that you won’t get your problem solve by someone with this level of experience. This is purely a personal experience that I always tend to have when I talk to a 1st line qualified support team member.

 

It was a Thursday, I was on my lunch break and thought I’d squeeze in a quick phone call to my phone manufacturer as I needed the battery replaced (I’m not going to name names). Anyhow, the website was so straight forward, I located the serial number on the phone and entered it into the required field, I put my phone number in and hey presto, I booked a phone call (this was required to get my phone sent off for repair). I received a phone call straight away and was feeling positive as I’d only eaten into about 5 minutes of my hour lunch break. I was only on hold for a couple of minutes before I got through to a member of the team. She was polite and sounded like she was ready to help. In my head all I needed to do was book my phone in and arrange a date and time to send it off for repair.

We were going around in circles and it actually made me laugh at one point because she was clearly reading off a script. She was asking me to perform a diagnostics test on my phone to check the battery life but didn’t seem to understand that the reason I was on the phone to her was because my phone battery wouldn’t last and therefore a diagnostics test was out of the question. Anyway, we reached the point in our conversation where her script ran out and she had no option but to revert back to the beginning.  This happened a fair few times and by about the third time I’d lost the will to live. I had to ask to speak to someone more senior. I was passed onto a friendly man, Tony. He asked me exactly what I needed, told me there was a waiting time for the battery (which was fine) and sorted my issue out in under 5 minutes. He was more qualified than the previous employee I talked to and I had an all-round stress free and pleasant experience talking with him. The fact that I remembered his name says it all.

This made me think about (and appreciate) our Service Desk team here at PCS. They’re all 3^rd line qualified and don’t read from scripts which means they’ll never go around in circles. This is not to say if you have a 1^st line issue they won’t sort it. Of course, if ‘switching it off and on again’ solves the problem then great!

The fact of the matter is, if 1^st line support doesn’t resolve your issue it’s important to have that extra bit of knowledge and expertise to get to the root of the issue. This is exactly what the 3^rd line qualified service desk team does here at PCS.