Time flies when you’re having fun, or so they say.. I’ve lost 2 years now, and it wasn’t fun. Covid sucks, so do all the politics surrounding it and clouding peoples common sense.
Working from home has been a blessing and a curse. I get a lot more done, both at ‘the office’ and at home. No 2 hours a day in the car. No quick dinners because I don’t have time to cook properly. No time spent cussing the idiots on the road. Those are good things, but also not as much time spent cultivating good relationships with the people I work with, all the interactions are video or phone calls, or impersonal emails.. no standing around chatting. I switched employers in the middle of all of this. The old firm cut me and my team, loose with a 5 week notice. They did treat us well on the way out, but still.. Oddly enough, I think we’re all better off for it. I really like the new place, most of the time… the majority of the team stayed at the old firm, just went to new departments, and for all but one that seems to have been a good move. The one is coming to work for me now at the new place. One other person moved on, but she seems happy with her new place as well. So overall, it was a good thing. It did hurt, 15 years I spent there, only to have some twit come in and decide they would be better off outsourcing us.
I still talk to a lot of people at the old place, and they are not appreciating the third party much at all. The best part is, my new employer was already using that same third party, and part of my new role was to turn that around, and do the reverse of what my old employer did. So, I get the satisfaction of getting rid of that same third party and getting us a top quality help desk. Not a bunch of ticket takers, but a team that can deliver first rate service on time, all the time.
A Support Center (Helpdesk) should be able to take your call and solve your problem 85% of the time. Some things they can’t fix, simply because it requires hands-on, which can’t be done over the phone. So they should be fixing it, quickly, or getting your issue routed to the right people who can and will solve it. It’s a hard, and mostly thankless job by the way. No one calls the help number to say ‘Hi, how are you? Hope you’re having a nice day.” No, when they call, they are already having a bad day and far too often it shows.