When Tom Ganley came to PictureTel as senior manager for the company's American customer support center in Andover, Mass., the support desk had become a sore spot. The average length of employment at the desk was 15 months — a disaster considering that it takes 12 months to get a new hire up to speed, Ganley says. The situation had been deteriorating for two years, primarily because of the market: PictureTel is a major player in the video collaboration industry, and tech people in that industry are in very high demand, Ganley explains. "People weren't staying. People were going. We couldn't train them. We couldn't hire them. Everything was falling apart."



The problem is not unique to PictureTel. The average help desk turnover rate is 65 percent, according to the Help Desk Institute in San Francisco — a rate that may look good to an executive in the fast food business but will make a high-tech executive blanch.



But there are exceptions to the rule that says good help is hard to keep. In a field where 25- to 35-percent turnover is considered good, and some companies have rates over 70 percent, Microsoft, which has 5,000 support engineers, has a turnover rate at its support desk of a stingy seven percent.



Training is a key contributor to Microsoft's phenomenal retention rate, says Eileen Crain, marketing communications manager for technical support. "We provide our support engineers with more than an ample amount of training — technical and otherwise — that allows them to grow in their positions and feel like they're constantly learning," she says. Microsoft gives its support engineers general instruction on the company's products, but also trains support staffers on customer satisfaction, customer relations, handling sensitive customer issues, and even communication skills like writing and creating presentations.



Training is one part of a company's arsenal to retain its help-desk employees. And as the level of turnover at help desks climbs, it's time to pull out all the weapons.



Times are Tough



Even in the best of times, help desk help is hard to keep. Sitting at a phone all day and listening to customers vent their problems can wear a person down. That grind, in conjunction with an unhealthy dose of job stress, contributes to high help-desk turnover rates. A widespread shortage of skilled IT workers exacerbates the situation. "With the supply decreasing and the demand increasing, internal IT shops are decimating the help desks because they don't have any place else to turn," says Peter McGarahan, executive director of the Help Desk Institute.



"Where we are, the unemployment rate is 2.7 percent, and it's even lower for high-tech workers," says Jim Moore, vice president of support at Sage Software Inc. (formerly State of the Art), an Irvine, Calif., maker of accounting software. "It's gotten real hard to find good people, and even more challenging to hang on to your people."



Those consulted for this article are nearly unanimous in saying that training is a crucial component in retaining the help desk employee. "They'll leave you if you train them, and they'll leave if you don't," McGarahan says, "but you'll get more productivity from them and they'll stay longer if you train them."



IHS Help Desk Service, a support outsourcer in New York City that did $15 million in business last year, turned to training to help reduce a staggering annual turnover rate of 113 percent. A retention program designed for IHS by the Herman Group (formerly Herman Associates), a consulting firm in Greensboro, N.C. includes a custom-designed certification course for non-technical hires. After completing the 18-hour program, the trainees are placed at client locations for six weeks so their knowledge can be tested in the field. About 25 percent of IHS's 200 help desk analysts receive this training.



Turnover has already dropped to 74 percent at IHS. "After the program, we found that training was a real hot, hot item for our people," says Eric Rabinowitz, president of IHS. The average stay of an employee at IHS is now 7.5 months. Among employees who have taken any of the company's training programs, that figure increases to 12.5 months. For employees who graduate from the company's analyst certification program, the average stay is 18 months.



Plus, there's the natural benefit of having better-trained workers. "The people who graduate from this program have the highest customer service ratings of anyone in our corporation," Rabinowitz says.



Stream International, a Canton, Mass.-based outsourcer of support, is developing a certification program for its help desk employees. "We have certified educators on our property that can provide that training, which is something people would have to spend thousands of dollars for in the outside world," says John Melo, director of organizational development. Such a program can give an employee a reason to stay in a job until he receives his certification, which could take as long as two years.



The Right Stuff



One way to keep good people at the support center or the help desk is to make sure the tech support people you hire have the skills the job demands. That may sound simple, but at many companies, determining an applicant's skills is more art than science.



Help desk managers say they look for interpersonal, technical, and administrative skills. And of those, interpersonal skills are the most important, asserts Bill Rose, founder and executive director of the Software Support Professionals Association (SSPA) in San Diego. "What we've learned over the last five years is that we're better off taking someone with very strong interpersonal skills and giving them technical training than doing the inverse of that," he says. That's because it's easier to give a customer service guru some technical expertise than to polish up someone with no interpersonal skills.



Microsoft looks beyond technical skills when it hires support people as well. "We look for people that are intelligent, that are driven, that have had some measure of success in their career or in school," Crain says. "It is our expectation that we may bring someone in for technical support who has never done anything technical before, and we're going to start from the bottom and train them."



To find round pegs for the round holes at IHS, Rabinowitz uses behavioral testing to predict how well a candidate will perform in the job. Behavioral testing identifies traits such as initiative, problem-solving ability, and flexibility, rather than testing specific skills such as the ability to run a computer program or access a database. Certain traits — patience, affability, and a desire to solve problems — are "model" traits for a support worker. Rabinowitz has tested about 5,000 people since the process was introduced at IHS. Rabinowitz says that customer-satisfaction surveys have shown that the behavioral approach is very successful.



Paths to Success



Simply administering a big dose of training is not usually enough. Employees have to feel that the training is leading them somewhere. Most support employees see few career paths open to them — a big problem when trying to retain them. "If you have only one job called tech support rep or support center rep, and the only other opportunities are outside the department, the chances are you're going to lose that person," SSPA's Rose says.



Microsoft offers support engineers a variety of career paths, says Crain. There's a mentoring path, through which an engineer takes on the added responsibility of helping other engineers solve problems. There's a technical path for engineers who want to specialize in one area, such as operating systems or end-user applications. There's also a product-preparation path, through which an engineer works with beta versions of a product and obtains customer feedback. There's a management path for engineers whose goal is to become managers. And there's a training path for engineers who set their sights on training other engineers.



Managers can play a huge role in keeping support employees focused and happy. At Stream, Melo focuses his training efforts on managers, who learn to understand their subordinates' career development issues — like the desire for training. Managers are trained to be better listeners and better motivators. They learn "the communication protocol," aimed at making them more visible to their staffs. Through this program, they learn to "manage by walking around," hold "town meetings" to educate workers about the company's business, and host breakfasts and lunches attended by executives and employees. Melo says that Stream's turnover rate is close to the industry average of 65 percent.



Many Methods



Training alone isn't the whole answer. At PictureTel, Ganley set a goal to increase the average stay at the desk to 24 months. He spent about 72 hours talking to each support desk person individually, getting a feel for their career goals and their attitudes toward their jobs. From those discussions, he formulated a multi-pronged plan to encourage the staff to stay. He offered a $1,000 bonus as an incentive to anyone who stayed with the company for six months. He increased salary reviews from once every 12 months to twice a year. The support center also adopted a four-day work week for support desk employees, and began a formal recognition program to award workers for achievements in quality, quantity, and reliability. Within five months, there were no open requisitions for jobs at the support desk.



Lawson Software, a Minneapolis-based maker of human resource and financial management software, also has very low turnover at its support desk — 9.2 percent a year, according to Randy Campbell, vice president for customer support.



A key to retaining employees at the support desk, Campbell says, is knowing what they want. With the assistance of a consultant, Lawson managers work with a sampling of employees organized into teams. The teams identify important issues in categories such as compensation, benefits, workload management, social environment, and management behavior.



To combat the routine and repetition that wear out help desk personnel, some companies try to build variety into the job. For example, at Autodesk, workers at the help desk have flexible schedules. "In addition to handling phones, people have offline time to give people the freedom to improve the help desk, catch up on administrative tasks, or learn about other departments," says Messick.



Building variety into support jobs was one of several ways that Sage Software, which has about 120 people on its help desk, reduced its retention rate from 40 percent to 20 percent. "We gave people more responsibility in their jobs and more variety in their jobs so they didn't have to spend their time answering the same question on the phone all day long," Moore says. Workers now solve problems through email and work in the company's lab to recreate and solve customer problems.



Try Anything



Autodesk managers try to create a relaxed atmosphere to decompress the high-pressure help-desk environment. "Employees can bring their dogs to work, and a scaled-down dress code is in effect," Messick says. And at Sage Software, helpers receive soft skills training to address nerve-battering events.



Just about anything is worth a try: Rabinowitz recently discovered that the numbers of departing employees at IHS spikes in August and January. "What we're planning to do is roll out big initiatives in terms of training and other retention tactics during the weeks just prior to those months," Rabinowitz says.



A little salesmanship can also contribute to retaining help desk staff. "I always told my people that there's no better place in a company for networking than the help desk," says McGarahan, who used to run help desk operations at Taco Bell. "You get to know every department and everything that's happening there. What a prime opportunity for networking."



John Mello is a freelance writer in Woonsocket, R.I. Write to him at jpmello@home.com.



Good Help Is Hard to Keep (sidebar)



Fighting Killer Tornadoes and Turnover



Every morning, Daryl Covey leaves his farm and drives 30 miles to the nerve center of the nation's weather radar in Norman, Okla.



There, Covey undergoes what he calls a "total shift of gears." He trades responsibility for 47 head of cattle for oversight of a support hotline that keeps radar probing the skies for severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, and hurricanes.



The support professionals who run the hotline answer calls about the radar system, which is shared by the National Weather Service, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Defense. Meteorologists and air traffic controllers depend on the radar to issue weather warnings and direct airplanes.



Just ask Kevin Pence, one of the hotline's customers. The science and operations officer for the National Weather Service office in Calera, Ala. was tracking killer tornadoes in central Alabama on March 6, 1996. "We already had six fatalities, so when our radar started acting up, I got on the hotline," says Pence. "They directed me to reboot an intermediate part of the radar system, and had us up and running in 15 minutes," Pence says.



Training His Crew



The Nexrad support hotline gets more than 2,500 calls a month, with peaks during summer storms. To keep the hotline running smoothly, Covey must be able to depend completely on his staff. So he has devised an elaborate training and certification program for the 25 people who staff the hotline around the clock. New hires aren't allowed to work alone on the hotline until they've been trained for a full year — dedicating 25 to 30 hours a week to their studies.



Given this long ramp-up time, Covey's training program must discourage turnover, not just impart skills. In the past, turnover has shot as high as 40 percent.



Fortunately, Covey understands both weather and training. He previously taught meteorologists how to use radar at the National Weather Service training center in Kansas City. "People get a sense of worth from the amount of training they are given," he says.



Out-of-Classroom Experience



Covey has set up his year-long program so that students are in the classroom for only two months. They spend the rest of the time studying manuals and software — and training, with mentors on the job. "It gives them a good perspective on what they have to learn to do the job," Covey says.



Covey also gives staffers a close look at their callers' daily lives. Trainees visit radar sites and watch as meteorologists issue thunderstorm, tornado, or flood warnings and air traffic controllers direct hundreds of aircraft in flight. Dan Frashier, a hotline operations specialist who works for Covey, visited a river forecast center in Tulsa, Okla. There, forecasters combined rain-gauge data and radar-based rainfall estimates to forecast how high rivers would rise.



At the end of the course, hotline trainees must pass on-the-job certification tests supervised by experienced hotline workers. The exams are simulations based on real-life problems.



High Marks



Covey's managers credit his program with keeping hotline churn from becoming a problem.



And Covey's staffers — despite the steep path to knowledge — give kudos to the program. "We didn't want to be thrown to the lions without being prepared," says Frashier.



The toughest judges of all have given Covey high marks. In annual customer surveys, meteorologists and radar maintenance technicians who call the hotline consistently give it an approval rating in the mid-90 percent range. "I'm extremely proud of that. The people in the hotline room are a phenomenal bunch," says Covey.



Steve Alexander is a freelance technology writer based in Minneapolis. Email him at s_j_alexander@rocketmail.com.



Full text COPYRIGHT Lakewood Publications Inc. 1998