One of the advantages of getting your phone, cable or Internet service from a local company is when you need to call tech support, you’re talking to someone who actually lives in your area and knows the neighborhoods they service. But who are the people on the other end of the line? To give you a peek behind the scenes of D & P Communications’ residential help desk, we asked one of our technicians, Ben Joanisse, to tell us about his job and what a typical day on the help desk entails.
To start with, our residential help desk operators are distributed in our 5 office locations — Petersburg, Adrian, Blissfield, Dundee and Tecumseh — and they work in shifts to allow them to cover a large number of hours. Ben works at our Blissfield office, and a typical day for him involves “a little bit of everything.”
D & P provides a complete range of telecommunications services, so help desk technicians need to be well-versed in telephone and cable TV systems in addition to a wide variety of ways to access the Internet, including fiber, DSL and fixed wireless, which may be used by customers in more remote areas.
But the help desk doesn’t just deal with our own services. For example, Ben recently spent a few days dealing with some problems customers were experiencing when they tried to make international calls. The problem didn’t have anything to do with our local service, but it took our help desk’s expertise to figure out where along the entire network the problem was cropping up, and to reach out to the right people to fix it.
Our help desk technicians also help customers troubleshoot their own equipment. If you’ve purchased a new wireless router and need help configuring it, or even if you just accidentally switched the input on your TV, Ben or one of his colleagues can walk you through it.
Working on a help desk takes a particular set of skills. There’s the technical ability, of course: Ben, for instance, earned his associate’s degree in networking. But beyond that, help desk technicians need to be both patient and very good at description, whether it’s talking a customer through how to fix a problem with their equipment or knowing how to ask the right questions to pinpoint the exact issue.
And for the technicians who work the help desk, every call brings something different.
“I learn something new every day,” Ben says.
To speak to a help desk technician, please call 888-221-2277, email servicedesk@d-pcomm.com, or visit www.d-pcommunications.com and click on the “How Can We Help?” box in the lower right corner of your screen to chat with a help desk technician live.
