phyllostachys 55: Minute Tech 40 show notes

40 - How Do I Track Those Calls?

Good morning, this is Alex Landefeld with episode 40 of the Minute Tech podcast -

coming to you for Thursday, November 29th , 2007

On this tech podcast about the broader meanings of technology, we'll mention:

- AT&T - did they deep-six iPhone sales for the holidays?
- How Do I Track Those Calls?
- Yahoo's Experts get slammed.

---------------

Minute Tech podcast is brought to you in part by:

Larry Tolbert's Sunday Morning Wu Style Taiji - 9:30 every Sunday morning at the Dunamis Baptist Church, in Wilkinsburg, PA.
"Move with the motion of the planet - move with Taiji" - e-mail leonardtolbert-[at]-hotmail-[dot]-com for more info.

And:

Ravelings, by Carol. Pittsburgh-region classes in needle-craft - encompassing crochet, embroidery, knitting, & tatting, as well as an associated lace collection. For more information, contact Carol at carolb207@alltel.net.


Tech News:

Bloomberg reports today that AT&T's chief Randall Stephenson has let the apple out of the bag by saying that Apple will be releasing a 3G-capable iPhone in 2008. Granted, Stephenson is not an Apple employee and is therefore perhaps not subject to the purported reality distortion field...but don't you think he'd consider it wise to not let this information slip until after the Holiday buying season? C'mon now, really!

Interestingly, yesterday evenings roundup from thestreet dot com, Cramer's "Recap: Gone Bottom Fishin'"....Cramer is talkin all about going by his 1990 playbook and buying up financial sector stocks such as Citi Group and Goldman Sachs. He states that in 1990 Prince Alwaleed of Saudi Arabia bought a stake in Citi, and that now, in 2007, an investment fund from Abu Dhabi is buying a similar stake in Citi. So, we're talking about bottom fishing. Remember folks....bottom fishing. In the very next breath...or paragraph...Cramer says oh, yeah, and also buy some Apple, RIM and Google. Are these bottom fishing stocks? Perhaps after the recent pullback, they are...but during the pullback would have been the opportune time to sing the buying song. Note that with Apple, pullbacks only seem to last a week or two...then something pushes Apple back up to new highs.

And the most recent bit of news - Pittsburgh software and podcast hosting company Wizzard Software's CFO John Busshaus was named Pittsburgh CFO of the year by the Pittsburgh Business Times. Narrowed down from a group of fellow nominees, Busshaus was noted for having "guided the company through four successful acquisitions in less than one year, as well as two capital raises (private placements) worth approximately $10M".

A link to the related article is in the show notes: Wizzard CFO Busshaus


Tech Question:

The tech question for today, related to the Help Desk call theme this week, is: "How Do I Track Those Calls?".

When taking calls and helping people resolve their various issues, whether it's dealing with a product from your company, or a document that their trying to type up, or a random object for which you're rendering help, it's good to have ways to identify the caller so that you can both track the progress of their issue, and later you can extract data about their call to provide call analysis for the management of your organization, to show the effectiveness of your service.

How do you track this information?

Well, you can use paper tablets, just writing down the information...and after a month of writing, you have a pile of paper tablets with gobs of information that you cannot readily access.

A slightly better solution is to use tabulated paper sheets, with categorized information boxes in which you can write down the caller's details. This format allows for some categorization of information...but still requires later data entry into a spreadsheet program to allow for analysis.

An infinitely better solution is to just enter information as it comes in into a spreadsheet program, such as Excel, Open Office, Apple's Numbers or Google's Spreadsheet. This way the information is in a ready format to be crunched at day, week or month-end. With this you can analyze for duration of calls, types of calls, geographic location of callers, and, with a bit of metadata about each caller, the product or systems that seem to be exhibiting the most calls.

The next step up is to have a database back end with a dataentry front end. The database will have far more capacity for information entered, will likely have more multi-user ability if you have multiple people taking calls, will probably be added to nightly server backup schedules, should your back end servers lose power, and allow for front-end calculations to show data analysis to both the call reception staff as well as the management, with built in business logic/programming.


Podcasting - Blogging News:

As I use many of the major "portals" for news: news.google.com for general, business and science headlines, and Yahoo's finance site for finance news and research, I tend to see the posts by Yahoo Finance's various "Expert" columnists, Penelope Trunk, Suze Orman, Robert Kiyosaki and Ben Stein, to name a few.

These columnists have very good columns on everything from personal finance to leadership to stock picks. To write this sort of thing, you have to be either living in the thought clouds or surrounded in part by those who are, so that you can either draw from examples of things you see around you or write from personal experience. Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher from 2,600 years ago, a contemporary of Confucious (Kung Fu Tzu), wrote some pretty amazing head-in-the-clouds things about leadership, character and general outlook in his Tao Te Ching verses. Do you think he worked in kitchens or dug ditches or waited tables through his life? Not likely.

In order to have people who write good articles, or philosophical treatises, you have to allow for them to have slightly higher existences than we do. If they then choose to contribute their up and down wisdom to the web-aether, and we who are far lower benefit from their writings, so much the better for civilization. I'm referring to all of this because Ben Stein and Rob Kiyosaki have had some pretty negative comments written in response to their recent articles. Comments are good...and we need to support the freedom to always be able to comment on other's writings...but many of these have been strident criticism of the foundations that have brought these various columnists forward. I, for one, am very thankful that they are taking the time to spill part of their souls onto digital paper for the benefit of others. And if they reap an outsize monetary benefit from this....well then, perhaps we each need to take a hint and start thinking, writing and publishing for the good of our peers.

Thats all for today on Minute Tech podcast.
you can reach me at minutetech@gmail.com -
and my blog is at minutetech.blogspot.com

"Move with the motion of the planet - move with Taiji"

- AT&T - did they deep-six iPhone sales for the holidays?
- How Do I Track Those Calls?
- Yahoo's Experts get slammed.

Go to the Minute Tech iWeb page to subscribe or listen to this podcast: Minute Tech.

phyllostachys 54 - Minute Tech 39 show notes

39 - What are the Three Most Important Parts of a Help Desk Call?

Good morning, this is Alex Landefeld with episode 39 of the Minute Tech podcast -

coming to you for Tuesday, November 27th , 2007

On this tech podcast about the broader meanings of technology, we'll mention:

- Black Friday and Cyber Monday;
- What are the Three Most Important Parts of a Help Desk Call?
- my apology for audio quality, and more on short podcasts.

---------------

Minute Tech podcast is brought to you in part by:

Larry Tolbert's Sunday Morning Wu Style Taiji - 9:30 every Sunday morning at the Dunamis Baptist Church, in Wilkinsburg, PA.
"Move with the motion of the planet - move with Taiji" - e-mail leonardtolbert-[at]-hotmail-[dot]-com for more info.

And:

Ravelings, by Carol. Pittsburgh-region classes in needle-craft - encompassing crochet, embroidery, knitting, & tatting, as well as an associated lace collection. For more information, contact Carol at carolb207@alltel.net.


Tech News:

Amazon's Kindle is amassing more and more commentary. Peter Brantley of O'Reilly Radar presents reviews by two reviewers, Jason Epstein, co-founder of On-Demand Books, and Mike Shatzkin, CEO of the Idea Logical Company and BaseballLibrary.com. Both views are well-written...and as usual, the comments at the bottom of Peter's O'Reilly page are very to the point.

Last friday was Black Friday, the first official shopping day of the 2007 holiday season, kicked off by 5 am sales around the US for those souls who weren't knocked out by the previous day's festivities. My family thought about getting out of the house....by noon. Then yesterday, Monday, was known as Cyber Monday, presumably the day when holiday revelers would be getting in to work and surfing the web for hot deals. Both Black Friday and Cyber Monday provided a nice little boost to the retail sector of the US stock market...which is a good thing...too much bad new lately has been taxing.

Have you heard of Solid-state hard drives? these are flash-ram based hard-disk replacements, with capacities ranging from 4 to 64 Gigabytes, which are purportedly going to allow Apple to release a flash-based notebook computer at MacWorld 2008, coming up in January. This is the primary bit of technology that most web pundits are blogging about as upcoming, since Leopard has been released, the iPods have been well refreshed and Macs are selling like hotcakes.


Tech Question:

The tech question for today, related to the Help Desk call theme this week, is: "Help Desk Call - What Three Things?".

In the previous show, we walked through a sample support call. We greeted the caller, we found out the rough details of the problem, we replicated the problem, in this case by opening a copy of the document in question and seeing what the issue that the caller was calling about, and then reached into our personal store of information to answer the question based on observed phenomena.

There are three things about answering a Help Desk call you must do:

(1) be polite to the caller;
(2) provide some sort of answer or solution;
(3) Identify yourself and your organization, and provide contact information.

So, number 1. Be polite. Generally, a caller is calling because he or she has exhausted his/her capacity to solve the problems and must rely upon somebody else to solve the problem, so by being polite you're helping to support the caller's self-esteem, which may have taken a hit by having to rely upon us. Of course, the people may just be calling as they're used to delegating certain informational tasks...so being polite just makes the conversation roll more easily.

Number 2 - provide some sort of information. You may not have a ready answer, so make sure to do something that will get the caller to the next level, such as provide the name and number of the person whom you will ask to call the user back. If you do have a ready answer, allow the caller to know that you have an inkling, and either answer it right away, or a request access to the item with which they're having a problem so that you can clarify and demonstrate the answer. This could be as simple as asking them to email a current copy of their document to you, or as moderately complex...but infinitely more useful...of remotely connecting to their desktop and showing them how to resolve the issue.

Number 3 - make sure that your name and contact information is always present for the caller. There is nothing quite so frustrating in the use of technology than to be partway through the resolution of a problem...and realize that you don't know who you spoke with, and what his or her name is. When you answer the call, identify yourself. When you send an email, even if internally, make sure you have a signature with name and phone number. When you complete the call, invite the caller to call again.


Podcasting - Blogging News:

First, I apologize to listeners...something was up with the audio on my system Sunday...Episode 36 on Sunday morning sounded awful due to some sort of electrical interference. Was I running a microwave? Something was jamming the audio recording signal...so I shall re-record that session this week, so that at least iTunes searchers don't come up with awful copies. Unfortunately, with my production schedule, I don't leave much time for troubleshooting shows: they get recorded, converted to .m4a and .mp3, and pushed out to the website immediately so that I can get on with the day.

Then, yesterday, Monday, the show didn't get out. But we're here now!

Okay....listened to my first five John C. Dvorak Tech 5 podcasts on Monday...along with the most recent Marketing Over Coffee and The M Show podcasts, with John Wall and Christopher Penn. I'll have to re-listen to the Marketing Over Coffee...I just remember that Christopher Penn was saying some awesome things....but that was Monday morning. Last week I listened to several of his Financial Aid Podcasts to see how they flowed...and he has such a natural voice. I'll have to ask...but can he possibly be going sans script? whoa! He can really talk up a show. Well, actually, see his podcasting 101 video on iTunes...very well done presentation on podcasting.

Thats all for today on Minute Tech podcast.
you can reach me at minutetech@gmail.com -
and my blog is at minutetech.blogspot.com

"Move with the motion of the planet - move with Taiji"

- Black Friday and Cyber Monday;
- What are the Three Most Important Parts of a Help Desk Call?
- my apology for audio quality, and more on short podcasts.

Go to the Minute Tech iWeb page to subscribe or listen to this podcast: Minute Tech.

phyllostachys 53: Minute Tech 38 show notes

38 - How do you answer a Help Desk call?

Good morning, this is Alex Landefeld with episode 37 of the Minute Tech podcast -

coming to you for Monday, November 26th , 2007

On this tech podcast about the broader meanings of technology, we'll mention:

- the youtube video "the office is closed"
- How do you answer a Help Desk call?
- the short-format podcast - listening to others.

---------------

Minute Tech podcast is brought to you in part by:

Larry Tolbert's Sunday Morning Wu Style Taiji - 9:30 every Sunday morning at the Dunamis Baptist Church, in Wilkinsburg, PA.
"Move with the motion of the planet - move with Taiji" - e-mail leonardtolbert-[at]-hotmail-[dot]-com for more info.

And:

Ravelings, by Carol. Pittsburgh-region classes in needle-craft - encompassing crochet, embroidery, knitting, & tatting, as well as an associated lace collection. For more information, contact Carol at carolb207@alltel.net.


Tech News:

(1) Have you seen the "The Office is Closed" youtube video? Greg Daniels and Paul Lieberstein, co-executive producers of the popular NBC sitcom "The Office" discuss the Writers Guild of America strike against their own show, detailing the lack of pay for internet distribution and production as the reasons why they are striking. Is this right? Should they be striking? Do we even understand what they're striking against? Actually, forcing the large content networks to quantify how workers get paid for online content could be a very good thing for writers and producers worldwide, as content creation and production will only be a growing phenomenon over the next several decades, so go WGA!


Tech Question:

The tech question for today, and essentially for this week, "How do you answer a Help Desk call?" is the culmination of the constant mental thrash of what to write about. In the end, however, answering help desk calls quickly, efficiently, politely and effectively is what I do and do well at the moment, so here goes. Today I'll just review for you a typical call; in subsequent episodes this week we'll review some of the techniques for helping the typical set of callers.

A typical call might go something like this:

"[current organization] Help Desk, Alex speaking, how may I help you?"

"Hi, I need help with this brief I'm working on, the lines aren't lining up with the line numbers."

"Okay" I say, "what's the document number?"

In my current work environment, the client has a firm-wide document management system, abbreviated as DMS. A document management system allows for all documents, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, Adobe Acrobat and MP3 files to be stored on a network server that has nightly tape backups run, and for they documents to be catalogued in a database front-end that allows for easy categorization, searching and retention.

"999999999, version 12" comes the answer from the caller. Generally, I'd ask the user's login code to enter into my call tracking software program...but sometimes the flow of the call is such that I can get that code a number of ways. In this instance, as the caller quickly supplied a document number, I can get the login code from their document usage history on the DMS.

"Okay, I'm searching for the document now" I say as I choose which of the firm-wide document libraries the document might be located in. Each of the 20-plus offices of the client firm has a different document numbering schema, so the office location can be identified easily by mentally equated the doc number with the office.

"I've found your document. As you're currently in it," I say, seeing the tell-tale on the database front-end showing the document is in use, "I'll pull up a copy".

"That's fine" the caller says. "I just need a quick guide on this".

As I open the document, I see the problem. This is a court pleading with double-spaced paragraphs and special line numbering down the left-hand margin, which allows courts to reference sections of a document more easily. The paragraphs are not lined up properly with the margin lines, which can be a quick fix".

"I see that your document has no headings through the document, so, just change your paragraph spacing from double-spaced to Exactly 24 pts, and your text will line up with the line numbers".

The caller does this and notes happy surprise that this has fixed her document.

"Oh, thank you. That looks much better. Now we can file this document electronically in 10 minutes. What was your name again?"

"Make sure you save the document next," I advise. "My name is Alex. Please call us back if you need further assistance", I say, just before ending the call.

Podcasting - Blogging News:

The optimum podcast length and content model - what is this? Everyone has their own length, their own method for putting things together. My listening goal this next week will be to find a couple of other short podcasts and listen to their shows to see how they accomplish this format. I'll listen to some more of Christopher S. Penn's Financial Aid Podcast, and John C. Dvorak keeps mentions on This Week in Tech that he has a short-format podcast too. I think it's called Tech 5 - I'll download those shows and listen to them, too. John has a rather dry sense of humor and comes up with rather pointed opinions about technology...so this should be an interesting "listen".

Thats all for today on Minute Tech podcast.
you can reach me at minutetech@gmail.com -
and my blog is at minutetech.blogspot.com

"Move with the motion of the planet - move with Taiji"

- the youtube video "the office is closed"
- How do you answer a Help Desk call?
- the short-format podcast - listening to others.

Go to the Minute Tech iWeb page to subscribe or listen to this podcast: Minute Tech.