Advanced Help Desk (AHD)

Advanced Help Desk (AHD) is a dedicated team of qualified Level 2 (L2) technicians who analyze and provide solutions to problems that cannot be resolved on Level 1 (L1) layer of support. The AHD team handles tickets routed by L1 support or creates tickets for the issues they encounter via monitoring tools. AHD can also be a backup to an on-site technician and can assist while troubleshooting any supported unit or software within the agreed scope.

AHD also handles tickets that require more expertise, higher technical knowledge, and/or more access rights. The team works closely and escalates/monitors the ticket lifecycle with respective Level 3 (L3) application or infrastructure support teams either on GDC Services or the customer side.

Technical background of AHD technicians allows to implement “shift-to-left” transfer for activities that earlier were performed by L3 support teams and therefore free up their time for more complex tasks. Our current AHD team has shifted to operational support the following L2 activities:

• Resolution of routine incidents covered by Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).
• Processing JML (Joiner-Mover-Leaver) and password requests across internal and external systems.
• Supervision of the business processes provided by specialized software, to the extent covered by SOPs.
• Implementation of standard changes connected to managed IT systems.
• Alerts management.

Based on our experience, “shift-to-left” transfer from L3 teams to AHD always requires significant efforts from L3 specialists. That’s why we, in addition to the pure technical AHD team, have a dedicated Knowledge Manager (KM) working with all parties involved to eliminate the knowledge gaps and provide a better service overall.

KM leads the Continuous Service Improvement process, sourcing feedback and knowledge gaps from the L1 Team Lead, L3 specialists and even business processes’ owners. The process consists of 3 main points:

1. Knowledge Base (KB) - sharing and continuously updating knowledge articles with fresh data and insights. Each KB article is periodically reviewed and updated with the KBA owner, and expired/irrelevant KB articles are archived

2. Regular Knowledge sharing sessions (KSS) - organized and led by KM with the AHD team, gathering questions/inputs from technicians; handling any open topics or pain points; regular knowledge refreshment sessions. Periodically organized testing on various topics can also result in additional knowledge sharing sessions.

3. Ad-hoc knowledge sharing sessions - Ad-hoc knowledge sharing sessions prompted by repeat or new questions opened by the AHD technicians or could be initiated by Customer as part of onboarding new IT solutions into operational support.