In today’s leadership meeting, IT team discussed on how to help customers better approach IT. The IT director highlighted two expectations.
Category A: We open more channels for customers to requests IT help and addressed it is not user friendly to ask users to submit a ticket if user has explained the request to the helpdesk in person.
Category B: The other concern is a simple request (i.e. reset password) would need 1-2 days to complete. Though the service is within SLA, it is difficult to understand why it take that long for a two-minutes task.
My thoughts
Currently we provide category A service for VIP customers.
Without additional cost, VIP customer can easily find the designated engineer in person and their request can be addressed within one hour. Considering 150 users and one helpdesk per 15-20 customers, it will require 8 helpdesk engineers to standby with estimated cost of 40K/month. It is viable for the whole site.
Category B expectation is much harder to achieve
Quick task is not necessary to get early service. For tickets in the same queue, it is first come first service, like any bank or queue system. Cutting the queue will only affect the overall service and in the end affect the service delivered.
What we have done to improve efficiency includes:
- There’s high priority queue (Severity 1/2), but requester needs to provide business justification, and helpdesk and will document the justification for review with service managers
- My time is used to review every ticket upon submission to speed up process. If there’s any ticket that may need more attention from my observation, I will remark the ticket and address to the related engineer directly (not applicable to regional/global service team).
- For urgent request, we can address first, but a ticket needs to be submitted for documentation purpose. Local helpdesk can education user if they do not know how to submit ticket we will suggest request users (excluding VIP) to submit ticket anyway. If do not like to submit ticket, call hot-line.
Achievements:
- SLA: 80% (2005) ==> 85% (2006) ==> 90% (2007-)
current, usually 93-95% (meaning 10-15 requests were not served within SLA) - The VIP support is proposed by service provider at 6500S$/mon; we saved the cost by optimizing the service team and dedicated on senior engineer to serve 11VIP+4Secretary.
Other potential improvements are
- Study tickets and plan user education or other proactive actions
- Provide more self-help services with support from regional and global teams
Confusions on managed service
RSC front line is required to assign ticket within 4 hours. This is the bottom line of service measure, and does not necessarily mean every ticket will be assigned after 4 hours. Most of the tickets are dispatched within 2 hours with additional tracking and escalation from local helpdesk who also monitors the ticket queues.
SLA measures managed service. We can drive the service provider to optimize, but if the requirements are too high, definitely service provider will protect themselves with SLA, and in return hurt ourselves.
Current workloads of local helpdesk
- Average 50 requests per week (excluding sub-tickets for new users)
- The site increased from 50 user to 110 now with average 5 new person per month.
- ~ 20hours needed for IT helpdesk to setup new user
- Schedule and ticket arrangement (1-2 hour)
- Asset verification and PC procurement (4 hours)
- PC setup (4 hours for OS setup, 2 hours for other software, 2 hours for physical setup)
- IP phone (1 hour)
- security card + RSA (2 hour)
- Accounts (2 hour)
- Orientation (1 hour)
Service Management Tips
- User needs to be trained with good habits, and expectation needs to be managed
- Ticket system is required to document the change and track service delivered
- Different queues are needed to manage VIP/non-VIP, and other urgent requests
- It is strongly discouraged to request local helpdesk to for something immediately (unless user agrees to escalate to severity 1)