Customer Support Management: Help Desk Staffing & Operations Analysis

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of customer support management, focusing on optimizing help desk operations and staffing requirements. It begins with an executive summary highlighting the utility of the Help Desk Staffing Calculator for determining staffing needs in a 24/7 customer support center. The report details how to improve customer service by addressing client queries efficiently, recommends three operational changes to enhance customer-client relationships, such as adjusting holiday and break policies for customer support executives, and provides a detailed user guide for the Help Desk Staffing Calculator. The guide covers inputting call durations, calculating productive days and hours, and determining the total number of calls handled daily and monthly. Ultimately, the report emphasizes the Help Desk Staffing Calculator's value in generating accurate staffing requirements, aiding operations and human resource managers in delivering effective customer support services.

Running Head: CUSTOMER SUPPORT MANAGEMENT
Customer Support Management
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1CUSTOMER SUPPORT MANAGEMENT
Executive Summary
To get an approximate idea of staffing requirements for an organization especially a customer
support center that has to be functional all through the day and night, is a problematic affair. The
Help Desk Staffing Calculator is a useful tool that has been designed to make this task an easy
and convenient affair. The Help Desk Staffing Calculator is quite simple to navigate and use, and
if utilized correctly can definitely make the administering of desk operations easy and quick.
This report talks about the different ways in which customer services can be improved upon,
discusses various operational changes that can be introduced to improve customer-client
relationships and provides a detailed user guide that ought to be followed, to generate accurate
results when using the Help Desk Staffing Calculator.

2CUSTOMER SUPPORT MANAGEMENT
Table of Contents
1. Introduction.........................................................................................................................................3
2. Case Summary.....................................................................................................................................3
3. Help Desk Operations..........................................................................................................................3
4. Help Desk Staffing Calculator – User Guide.......................................................................................4
4.1.1. Inserting Call Durations...........................................................................................................4
4.1.2. Calculating the Number of Productive Days in a Calendar Year.............................................5
4.1.3. Calculating the Number of Productive Hours in a Calendar Year............................................6
4.1.4. Calculating the Total Number of Weekdays for Which the Customer Service Centre remains
Open 7
4.1.5. Calculating the Total Number of Calls made by Customer Service Executives every Day and
Every Month............................................................................................................................................7
5. Conclusion...........................................................................................................................................8
Bibliography................................................................................................................................................9

3CUSTOMER SUPPORT MANAGEMENT
1. Introduction
The Help Desk Staffing Calculator is a useful software tool that has been designed to
designate the total number of employees that ought to be recruited by a company to run help
desk operations in a smooth and efficient manner. The Help Desk Staffing Calculator is
relatively easy to use and requires its uses to follow instructions diligently and in a step by step
format in order to generate accurate staffing requirements for a customer service provider. This
report discusses how customer support services can be improved upon to help clients get their
queries resolved quickly and easily, recommends three operational changes that ought to take
place to make customer services more efficiently and provides a detailed user guide or
description on how the Help Desk Staffing Calculator is to be used.
2. Case Summary
Using the Help Desk Staffing Requirements Software can be useful for a customer
support executive when explaining operations to the supervisor who is placed in charge of his or
her work. The customer support executive will be able to demonstrate to his or her supervisor,
the number of hours that the executive has to compulsorily put in, on every working day in order
to attend to client requirements in the best possible way, based on the number of calls that are
received and the nature of the queries that are made to the customer support executive.
3. Help Desk Operations

4CUSTOMER SUPPORT MANAGEMENT
The customer support executives should not be allowed to take off on every public
holiday in the year as there are people who can find difficulties in using their products on
holidays too and may need support and assistance on how to get the matter resolved. Customer
support executives need to be encouraged by operations managers to work on at least some
scheduled holidays during the year in order to attend to customer queries and requirements as
adequately as possible and make them feel confident about using the products that they are
finding difficult to use or to maneuver.
Customer support executives ought to be encouraged by operations managers to cut down
on their lunch time a bit in order to meet customer requirements suitably and quickly. By taking
too long a lunch break, customer service executives can often miss out on important calls or
customer requests that had to be urgently attended to but which could not be resolved because
the customer support executive was away on a lengthy lunch break.
Customer support executives must also be made to understand that they cannot take sick
leave at the drop of a hat, say when they are running a light fever or cough and cold for instance.
Attending to customer queries requires the provision of round the clock support and taking sick
leave can mean a customer not getting any solution or suggestion to improve the problem he or
she is facing over the use of a product, because a customer executive is a away on sick leave that
could have been avoided.
4. Help Desk Staffing Calculator – User Guide
4.1.1. Inserting Call Durations

5CUSTOMER SUPPORT MANAGEMENT
The Help Desk Staffing Calculator requires to insert the average duration of at least three
customer calls that are made to a customer support service center on a given day.
Mention the duration of the first call in the box designated for this purpose. For instance, the first
call could last for three minutes.
Mention the duration of the second call in the second box. This call can take longer and can last
for approximately 7 minutes.
Mention the duration of the third call. This could take even longer and last for maybe 10
minutes.
Depending upon the nature of the industry for which the customer queries are being made, the
duration of the calls could be longer. For instance, the duration of the first call, if being made to a
customer support technician working in the telecom sector could take around four minutes, as
customers will be asked to provide their name and personal details in order for the customer
executives to assist them in the most suitable way.
4.1.2. Calculating the Number of Productive Days in a Calendar Year
The Help Desk Staffing Calculator requires users to mention the number of days for
which the employee remains productive during the year.
Insert the total number of days in the year in the first box. This should be kept at an average of
365 days. Leap years, maybe taken into consideration.
In the next box, mention the number of days in a year for which the customer support centre is
does not remain open.

6CUSTOMER SUPPORT MANAGEMENT
In the third box, mention the the number of public holidays during which the customer support
centre remains closed. This could be ten days or fourteen days depending on the number of
public holidays that are scheduled for a particular calendar.
Next, in the following box, insert the number of days being taken off by customer support
service employees as sick leave and for training purposes.
Next, insert the total number of productive days that are available in the calendar year. This
figure should also kept at an average of 365 days to facilitate calculations to be made quickly and
easily by the software. Once all these details or information is presented into the concerned
boxes, the average turnover percentage rate will be calculated by the Help Desk Staffing
Calculator.
4.1.3. Calculating the Number of Productive Hours in a Calendar Year
In the first box, insert the average number of days taken by the customer support service
employee to have lunch
In the following box, mention the average number of hours during the day when the employee is
actually taking calls and attending to customer requirements
In the box that follows, mention the average number of hours that are being spent on consuming
lunch etc.
In the next box, mention the productive number of hours in the day
The calculator will then proceed to put together the productive number of hours in a year
together with the number of working days in the year. Next, the number of productive hours

7CUSTOMER SUPPORT MANAGEMENT
available that entire will be generated by the calculator, the total number of months in the year in
which work is done and the number of productive hours that are made provided by the customer
support employees every month.
The calculator will also generate the number of productive minutes in every year as well as the
number of productive minutes that are made available by the customer service employees every
single day.
4.1.4. Calculating the Total Number of Weekdays for Which the Customer
Service Centre remains Open
Insert the number of weekdays in a year that the customer service centre remains open, in the
first box.
In the following box, mention the number of weekends in the year for which the customer
service centre will stay open.
Once the details are given, the Help Desk Staffing Calculator will work quickly to generate the
total number of days in the year during which the customer support service centre remains
accessible to each and every one of its clients and during which it provides unrestricted services.
4.1.5. Calculating the Total Number of Calls made by Customer Service
Executives every Day and Every Month
In the first box, mention the number of total calls that are made during the year. The total number
of working months in the year is taken as twelve by the calculator and on the basis of the
information given it will proceed to generate the total calls that are made by customer support

8CUSTOMER SUPPORT MANAGEMENT
executives on a monthly basis as well as the total number of calls that are made by them on a
daily basis.
In the next box, insert the number of current employees serving at the customer support centre
Once all the required information is inserted accurately, the Help Desk Staffing
Calculator will proceed to generate a detailed calculation by first generating the total number of
monthly calls, average resolution time and the number of minutes that are required in order to
resolve calls. This information will then be converted to hours, and the calculator will mention
the number of hours that it takes in a day to resolve customer calls, and the number of hours it
takes for an individual customer support service executive to resolve customer calls after which
the staffing requirement figures will be arrived at.
5. Conclusion
The Help Desk Staffing Calculator is indeed a very useful tool to own and use on the part
of a company or a business enterprise that offers customer support services round the clock. The
Help Desk Staffing Calculator generates accurate staffing requirements based on the information
that is fed into it and is quite easy to comprehend and utilize by operations and human resource
managers involved in the provision of customer support services.

9CUSTOMER SUPPORT MANAGEMENT
Bibliography
Andrews, A. A., Beaver, P., & Lucente, J. (2016). Towards better help desk planning: Predicting
incidents and required effort. Journal of Systems and Software, 117, 426-449.
Bober, P. (2014). Simulation for IT service desk improvement. Quality Innovation
Prosperity, 18(1), 47-58. http://www.qip-journal.eu/index.php/QIP/article/view/343
Decker, E. N., & Townes, J. A. (2017). Going Vertical: Enhancing Staff Training Through
Vertically Integrated Instruction. In The Experiential Library (pp. 135-146).
Diao, Y., Lam, L., Shwartz, L., & Northcutt, D. (2013, October). SLA impact modeling for
service engagement. In Network and Service Management (CNSM), 2013 9th
International Conference on (pp. 185-188). IEEE.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6727834/
Fenner, G., Lima, A., de Souza, N., Moura, A., & Andrade, R. (2015, May). A system dynamics
model for managing service desk capacity. In Integrated Network Management (IM),
2015 IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on (pp. 1424-1427). IEEE
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7140506/
Fenton, K., & Casey, A. (2015). A tool to calculate safe nurse staffing levels. Nursing
times, 111(3), 12-14. https://europepmc.org/abstract/med/26021029
Gauder, H., & Escobar, H. (2016). Tracking for Outreach: Using Data for Cross-Unit Purposes.
http://old.libraryassessment.org/bm~doc/103-gauder-2016.pdf

10CUSTOMER SUPPORT MANAGEMENT
Nassif, L. N., & Carnevalli, D. S. (2015, January). Calculation Model of the Status and Staffing
for Security Management-A Case Study. In Proceedings of the International Conference
on Security and Management (SAM) (p. 279). The Steering Committee of The World
Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Applied Computing
(WorldComp)
http://search.proquest.com/openview/8eb7000746ead0765ebe167fc300aeb3/1?pq-
origsite=gscholar&cbl=1976342
Plücker, W. (2014). Personnel calculation in health care: intensive care and intermediate care
units. Medizinische Klinik, Intensivmedizin und Notfallmedizin, 109(7), 504-508.
https://europepmc.org/abstract/med/25330874
Sewell, B. B., & Alarid, T. (2013). Managing the access services desk: Utilizing layered levels of
staff skills. Journal of Access Services, 10(1), 6-13.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15367967.2013.738389
Thannimalai, P., Kadhum, M. M., & Feng, C. J. (2014). Theoretical approach with simulation
models on full cross training and workforce working schedule to increase IT Help Desk
efficiency. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 129, 236-243.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042814028547