Every laptop, scanner and counter PC we own carries a small sticker with the service desk phone number on it. The same number is on a poster in every drivers' room and on the back of the depot staff handbook. For most people at a depot, that sticker is the whole of IT.
In February we moved the service desk onto a new telephony platform, and it came with a new number. The old provider agreed to forward the old number for ninety days. We put the new number on the intranet, emailed it to every manager and planned to replace the stickers during routine depot visits over the summer.
The forwarding ended in May. Over the next two months calls from the depots fell by about a third. Our monthly report recorded this as good news. We had just fixed a long running fault with the goods in scanners, and the drop looked like the reward. Nobody asked why the fall was almost entirely at depots and hardly at all at head office, where people use the intranet and the self service portal.
We found out in July, when a depot manager mentioned in a meeting, almost in passing, that the help number had been dead for weeks. Callers heard a recording saying the number was not recognised. Some asked a colleague, some rang a friend at head office, some restarted the device and hoped, and most simply carried on with whatever was broken. In two months we had received eleven emails from depot staff explaining that they could not get through. Behind them were roughly six hundred calls that never reached us, and some of those problems were still waiting.
The old number had not yet been given to anybody else, and the old provider reinstated it within three weeks, pointing at the new desk. It will stay that way for as long as stickers with it exist. We replaced about two thousand four hundred stickers over the following month, and the depots now hold a stock of them. We also report calls to the old number separately, and a fall of more than a fifth in contacts from any site in a month now triggers a call from us to the site manager to ask whether anything has changed.
A fall in demand has two explanations. Either fewer people need you, or fewer people can reach you, and the numbers look exactly the same. Before you take credit for the first, check the second.
– Serguey Shinder
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