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What does a Help Desk Coordinator do?

Vicki Watson
Vicki Watson

A help desk coordinator accepts and prioritizes computer help requests and assigns the tasks to the appropriate technicians on the staff. He or she monitors these tasks until they are completed and might have to assign them to new technicians or specialists if they are especially problematic or urgent. The coordinator must keep those who made the request and others within the organization apprised of the status of the work and any solutions that are being undertaken.

After receiving the request, a help desk coordinator enters the work order into a tracking system, where he or she assigns it to a technician and tracks the status. The coordinator must also assign a priority level to each task to help the technicians which tasks are the most urgent. If the technician assigned to the task is unable to resolve the issue, the coordinator upgrades the job status to a higher priority level and has a specialist address it. As tasks are completed, this person makes any necessary notes in the computer tracking system before marking the job completed.

Man with hands on his hips
Man with hands on his hips

Help desk coordinators interact with a wide variety of people within the organization they serve. For instance, they may work with a company project manager to organize the necessary assistance needed for specific projects with which the information technology (IT) department must get involved. They work together with facility managers when building construction jobs require things such as installing cabling for the computer network.

This employee also works as a liaison between the people he or she serves and the computer technicians that he or she manages. Additionally, the coordinator must ensure that problems get solved in a timely, efficient manner while creating as little inconvenience as possible for the computer users who request help. The coordinator constantly works to streamline the process of solving computer issues while adhering to the operational policies and procedures the company demands.

To perform this job, an individual needs to be able to gather the necessary data from the person making the request. He or she must also be able to analyze the reported issue and assign it to a team member best qualified to resolve the problem. This person must be able to manage multiple tasks as well.

A help desk coordinator must also have extensive knowledge of computer hardware, software, and networking in order to evaluate the best methods of addressing issues. Having a work history in an IT department often gives the individual insight into the tasks involved. Along with technical abilities, excellent verbal and written communication skills are also required.

Discussion Comments

Lostnfound

@Grivusangel -- Sounds like fun. People like that drive me crazy. it should be required for all managers to pass some kind of test before being promoted, and to be reviewed yearly -- by their employees -- on their effectiveness as a supervisor. Maybe that would wake some of them up.

I'm not implying it's easy to be a help desk coordinator. Something tells me it's a thankless job, with an endless number of ways to screw it up. I just know with the little customer service I have to do in my job helps me to realize I don't want to do customer service full time, or help coordinate it! That's a bad, bad position to be in, in my opinion. Nothing but pitfalls come with that kind of job.

Grivusangel

My sister-in-law works as a help agent for a tech support service and says the help desk coordinator can make the work either fantastic or miserable. She says one of the coordinators really knows how to keep things moving, and is good about directing calls to the techs who are best suited to handle that particular issue.

She said the other manager tends to assign all the calls to one or two agents, rather than spreading the calls out, which means two people are doing nothing, while everyone else is sitting around. She also said that manager gets upset if the agents transfer the customer to another agent instead of handling it, even though they may already be working with two or three other customers.

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