Gough, Gough & Hamer Investment (the Gough Group) is a large privatelyowned New Zealand company that incorporates a diverse range of semirelated businesses, from new and used equipment, material handling forklifts, truck and trailer accessories, and earth moving equipment, through to finance and custom engineering design.

The group consists of 52 business units and approximately 800 staff throughout New Zealand and Australia. It distributes brands including Caterpillar earth moving equipment and Hyster forklifts, alongside truck and trailer accessories from TWL and Transpecs.

As a result, it runs an expansive and varied IT environment, consisting of laptops, desktops and Wintel servers on the hardware side, and a range of software applications, including Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formerly Microsoft Navision) and Lotus Notes.

After establishing a new support team of six, including two frontline helpdesk analysts, a desktop engineer, senior systems engineer, and IT helpdesk team leader, the group faced a significant challenge building and formalising the new helpdesk processes from scratch.

Of critical importance was the need for a system to log, escalate and track the resolution of the 800 plus calls the helpdesk team handles per month.

“With only two helpdesk analysts acting as the first point of contact for IT support, and a service level agreement requiring calls to be answered within 30 seconds, we needed a solution that enabled call information to be logged quickly so analysts could move to the next call,” says Brad Law, the group’s IT helpdesk team leader.

“However, given the call volumes, it’s also very easy to lose track of who you’ve spoken to after the tenth call, so we needed a solution that enabled us to monitor all the jobs that had been escalated to an engineer and to prompt us with reminders if a call wasn’t resolved within a certain period,” he says.

The requirement for a formal call logging solution – rather than relying on manual, paper-based documentation processes – was particularly important given the expected call volumes.

After evaluating a number of solutions, the Gough Group selected FrontRange Solution’s HEAT as the best fit for its requirements.

HEAT provides an easy-to-use, full-featured customer service and support solution with a single view of the customer, allowing organisations to reduce labour and systems costs, streamline customer support interactions and improve customer retention.

The group selected HEAT primarily for its easy-to-use interface, which enabled fast input of call information, and ability to automate what would otherwise be manual, paper-based processes.

Since implementing HEAT, the Group has been able to establish a strong internal service desk operation.

“The feedback we’ve received from users to date has been that they now receive a better and more personalised service since it has been brought back in-house, and HEAT has contributed to that efficiency,” Law says.

The increasing call volumes received by the help desk after hours further demonstrate user confidence.

“This is a clear indication that staff feel they can now ring after hours and something will be done rather than having to wait until the following morning,” explains Law.

The HEAT Plus Knowledge component of the solution has also improved first call resolution rates.

“Because the helpdesk is new, analysts had limited or no experience supporting a lot of the applications the group uses,” says Law.

“The knowledge base within HEAT enables us to capture and store support information for reuse to resolve similar issues in the future. This has enabled us to push first call resolution up to 60 per cent, a figure we expect will increase as the knowledge base continues to expand.”

The Gough Group expects to achieve payback on the solution within 12 months.

For more information
FrontRange Solutions
www.FrontRange.com.au
0061 2 8080 3300

September 2007

Brad Law, The Gough Group's IT helpdesk team leader