How many tech support calls did your help desk or IT department take last week? Last month? In the last six months?

I raised those questions in June 1999 in an article titled “Keep a log of telephone support calls to pinpoint how your time is spent.” Maybe your CDR (call detail reporting) system automatically tracks those statistics. If not, you need to track those calls on paper or in a database (or both).

We’re updating our form and creating an Access database
To make it easy for you to track your calls, we created a ready-to-use telephone support log, and over 6,000 of you have downloaded it. (You can download our form here.) Figure A shows one section of that form.

For those of you who’d rather type than fill in a printed form, we’re going to create an Access 97 database you and your help desk operators can use to track your support calls. Before we start, we want to make sure it’s going to be a tool you can use effectively in your shop.

If you’d like to contribute your two cents to the telephone support log form (and to the subsequent database), please send us your feature request no later than Friday, Jan. 21, 2000. We’ll look at all the suggestions and combine the best features in a new, updated telephone support log. By participating in this “open document” forum, you’ll be helping create a tool your fellow IT support professionals can use in their shops.

Figure A
Does this form track all the information you need for your help desk calls? We want to know what other fields you’d use in your shop.

Please send us your feature request no later than Friday, Jan. 21, 2000. We’ll incorporate the best suggestions into version 2 of our telephone support log.