How do you manage unexpected high call flow?
Posted by AvailableNectarine73@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 21 comments
People who manage IT helpdesk, how do you manage your team who got exhausted and frustrated due to an unexpected high call flow?
Tall-Geologist-1452@reddit
We do not have a helpdesk phone line... that is just another type of walk up and bypassing the ticketing system ..
Prestigious_Rabbit30@reddit
If it's unexpected, then something broke somewhere. Find out what broke and why, and send out communication to all users or clients impacted. If you can, set up a dedicated "status" page for this outage, where people can see the current status (so that they do not phone every 5 minutes to ask if it will be resolved), and communicate when there is an ETA for the fix, a workaround and/or a final resolution.
You could also, if possible, update your call centre recording to indicate that you are aware of the problem and that it is being addressed.
Draft a standard response for all the related issue tickets when the issue has been resolved, which the service desk team can copy-paste as the resolution to all the tickets.
KnownConcentrate1269@reddit
I chuck in a message before the call is routed to the call queue explaining what is wrong, when the next update will be and to hang up if you are currently having that issue if not hold on the line to be routed to the helpdesk queue.
dedjedi@reddit
pay them more.
DropTheBeatAndTheBas@reddit
every service desk ive been on has this problem; put more people on the desk, increase sla response times, close tickets if no response from customer via a 3 strike rule, if the issues are caused by a bad system breaking allot in the first place , that needs fixing first !
AvailableNectarine73@reddit (OP)
What I meant is an unexpected and rare event, can't put more people and increase sla response due to a rare event. And we can never predict the rare event.
WWGHIAFTC@reddit
An actual event? Send or have your manager send an all staff / effectes staff notice and start closing tickets with the notice text copied.
OkayArbiter@reddit
I mean, you can't staff for the 1% rare events, you staff for the 90% common days. Best you can do is:
- Potentially have more people on the phone, if your system allows multiple logins, etc
- Put up banners on your help portal indicating you're aware of the large issue, so no new tickets are required
- Place a voice message between the caller and your team, so that they have to hear someone say the issue is known, and if they are calling about the issue, to hang up (politely)
Fantastic-Shirt6037@reddit
You get back to them saying you’ve received their request and due to higher than average volume response mag be delayed.
Is your SLA based on resolution time or response time? There’s your answer
FundedPro147@reddit
If your org has problem/change management processes setup properly and your ITSM tooling is setup so trends are easy to spot, you should be able to cut down unexpected high call frequencies to the point where it will not exhaust your team. Other than that, make sure you have a several ways to communicate to your users that the issue is being worked on and that they don't need to continue calling.
anonymousITCoward@reddit
usually theres a common underlying issue for unexpected high call volumes our triage guy asses the call and and forwards off if its not part of the greater issue, if it is he collects information and that gets filtered to the handler, which disseminates the information to to the team that is working the issue. This way they can direct the members to the highest need and keep a few members on actively resolving the issue.
In one case we had an event that slowed the internet for the entire state because of the nature of the issue we had a canned response that we set up in the IVR before we got the calls, that cut down call volume considerably
AvailableNectarine73@reddit (OP)
I like the IVR one, thats actually I follow here too. What I am looking for is how one can manage people from your team at that time, team members get exhausted and frustrated. How you manage that frustration of team?
anonymousITCoward@reddit
Oh sorry I can't help with that, I'm usually the frustrated one, I'll go out and and sit on the shitter for a few minutes or something... actually the process that I described is how I (usually the "handler") takes care of the team working the issue.
If it's just a day where you're getting hit hard with calls for no apparent reason, you need a dispatcher or someone like that to set the expectation that someone will get back to them in a realistic amount of time. The other job of the dispatcher would be to assess the issue and assign it to the person that will most likely resolve it most quickly.
unknwnerrr@reddit
Easy. Leave the option to leave a VM that then gets created to a ticket.
Valkeyere@reddit
Every buisness I've ever called has 'we are currently experiencing a higher than normall call volume' to some effect in their on-hold music.
Either they sit on hold or they dont. If it's important they'll email.l the ticket queue and we'll determine its urgent.
Lower_Fan@reddit
If you have a sudden increase of calls then something must have broken address the company or you clients and don’t worry to much about responding each one individually.
Wise-Butterfly-6546@reddit
Ran a global helpdesk for years, three regions, follow-the-sun, and the rare-event days were the ones that wrecked people. You can't headcount your way out of a 3x Tuesday and you can't predict it.
Few things that actually saved us before I get to the tool part.
First 15 minutes of a surge is everything. We had a "surge mode" macro that fired an auto-ack with a status page link and a one-line form asking "is this blocking you from working, y or n." Cut inbound noise in half because most people are just checking that you know.
Parent-merge aggressively. One incident, eighty tickets. Your team works one problem instead of eighty. The second the fix lands, the queue collapses on its own.
Get something into the company Slack announcements channel inside 10 minutes. A 90 second Loom and a three line KB stub deflects more volume than another body on the phones ever will.
And honestly, postmortem the response not the outage. Time to ack, time to broadcast, time to merge. Burnout is downstream of slow comms, it's almost never actually about call volume.
On the tooling side, we went through the whole circus. Tried two of the big-name AI helpdesk platforms, did a pilot with one of the voice-agent startups everyone was hyping last year, none of it stuck. Hallucinated on KB stuff, couldn't handle escalation context, and the "AI" was basically a glorified IVR.
Ended up landing on Claire (letsaskclaire.com) about six months ago and I'll just say it, soooo happy. "She" picks up overflow calls and tickets, handles the password resets, VPN loops, "is it down for everyone" tier-1 stuff start to finish, and when she escalates to a human she hands over the diagnostic already done so my team isn't starting from zero. HIPAA-compliant which mattered for us. On the last bad day she ate roughly 60% of the call volume in the first hour while the team worked the actual root cause. No affiliation, just a relieved customer. Happy to compare notes on rollout if you DM, took us about a week to get her trained on our KB.
Fix the comms loop first though. Tools won't save a broken playbook.
CPAtech@reddit
Astroturf with OP.
wireditfellow@reddit
Yea it sucks. We assign one person to just take calls, make tickets and move on to next call.
Anthropic_Principles@reddit
If the team is drowning in calls and they clearly need a break, I take them off the phones, and put the kettle on.
The calls will still be there when they get back. The SLAs are probably all shot anyway because of the backlog and queue length, so let's just kick back for 10 mins take a break, get some air, and relax.
Palmovnik@reddit
Disable phone lol