Benefits of Service Desk in Comparison with Local IT Professionals

Local IT professionals vs Service Desk

Calls from customer’s office staff were handled by two employees in St. Petersburg who also provided on-site support. In addition, there were administrators in five other cities.

«We could not analyze in detail what was happening. Users often turned to a local professional in person instead of registering a ticket. Because of this, the error of our statistics on requests for support reached 20-30%. So we could not accurately take into account and predict labor costs, and it was also difficult to determine the most common problems of users. At the same time, it was enough to restart the PC and read the message on the screen carefully to eliminate some problems», said Service Manager from customer side.

The construction company planned to reduce costs and switch to remote support for most cases, as well as to minimize the number of visits of IT professionals and the time of their presence in the office. To solve these problems, the customer turned to ICL Services which is a service division of ICL group of companies, one of the largest system integrators in Russia.

There were the following requirements for supporting IT infrastructure:

• response time to a call is 30 seconds
• response time to an email request is 4 hours
• arrival time of an employee on the next working day (if the application is a high priority one) is no more than 4 hours after the start of the working day
• user satisfaction rating is not lower than 8 out of 10.

Single point of contact

ICL Services provided a single point of contact: users can contact IT support staff by phone (8 800...). All requests from the builders, financiers, and accountants of the customer are accepted by the Service Desk. Each ticket is registered in the ITSM system.

The problems are solved during the telephone consultation or using a remote connection to the PC. ICL Services provides comprehensive support of the IT infrastructure, including peripheral equipment and specialized CAD software. Service Desk works nine hours a day and five days a week, in accordance with the working hours of the offices.

Four ICL Services employees were trained by the customer. In total, about 10 professionals are involved in this project; 2 employees of the construction company who are familiar with the specifics of the customer’s business processes participate in the provision of support services.

Control over the ticket at all support lines

If the ticket affects specific applications or the Desk Service does not have the competence to solve the problem, the ticket is transferred to the customer’s employees or third-party support providers. When a ticket is handled by a third party, Service Desk controls its entire life cycle. If it is not possible to solve the problem remotely, the ticket is assigned to a field engineer. Field engineers work in six Russian cities and from time to time go to the facilities in their regions.

ICL Services uses the Snaryad field staff management system. Using a mobile app, an engineer indicates the time of confirmation of the work order, time of departure and time of arrival at the target office or construction site. After resolving the issues, the engineer attaches a photo of the Work Completion Certificate and the user’s feedback. Snaryad stores all the necessary data and allows the dispatcher to check tickets for a specific engineer or facility.

«On the one hand, it is convenient to have an IT professional on site. You can contact him/her personally to quickly solve your problem. But if your professional is busy with the execution of the request of one particular user, and at this moment something breaks down somewhere else, then no one can help other users. Service Desk eliminates this risk. Now 60% of the problems are solved by the first line support. The remaining tickets require the participation of a field employee or are outside the competences of the first line, and therefore they are assigned to other support teams», says Ksenia Zaitseva, Service Manager, ICL Services.

High rating in the first month after launch

The customer has outsourced support of its IT infrastructure and completely abandoned the participation of local IT professionals who now receive more high-priority business tasks. At the same time, the costs related to deployment of the Service Desk were lower than it was expected.

Services have become more manageable and transparent, and the customer now receives accurate statistics on the requests and instant feedback on their handling.

Thanks to Service Desk, employees have become more attentive to the mailings and instructions.

The project was launched in November 2017, and the preparatory period took two months. From November to May, there were about 4,200 user requests. Once their issue is resolved, users leave ratings and comments. Already in the first month, the average score of Service Desk was 8.91 out of 10.

«Most users have reported positive changes. They understand that they can call and solve the problem by phone. Users begin to understand the procedures and learn to solve problems themselves. Of course, there are some issues that require improvements and joint efforts. To do this, we hold weekly meetings and find solutions together», said customer’s Service Manager.

Partnership development

Since the company has started to outsource many IT services (remote user support — Service Desk, local user service, network infrastructure support, etc.), they have to outsource part of the 1C application support as well, including not only 1C user support, but also improvements to the existing functionality and development of new functions. A foreign construction company has been cooperating successfully with ICL Services since 2014. This time, too, we have been trusted with this part of the business. On 1 July 2018, ICL Services started providing effective support to the customer’s users with respect to 1C applications.

Objectives

To reduce its labour costs by outsourcing the application support to ICL Services

Solution

To provide 1C support to the customer’s users, we have connected our specialists to a unified ITSM system. The system was already used by the ICL Services technical support staff as part of the Service Desk project to ensure continuous ticket processing. On average, ICL Services specialists process up to 40 tickets per month, including long-term project activities and development services for the customer.

Results

Since 1 July 2018, ICL Services has been successfully supporting a series of 1C applications for the foreign construction company and actively implementing new improvements based on the customer requirements. The number of supported applications is constantly growing. Back in July 2018, only 2 applications were supported while now the number stands at 6. And there’s more to come. The customer holds our professional approach in high regard and is entrusting more and more sophisticated projects and tasks with us.