When the help desk gets busy at Solution 6, a software vendor specialising in service organisations such as lawyers and accountants, it gets extremely busy.

“During tax season we ramp up to thousands of calls each day,” says General Manager of Support Andrew Housego.

One of the company’s strategies to cope with this spike is operating discrete teams to offer support on different products. Several of these teams, however, operated their own software and followed unique processes, a situation that created inefficiencies.

“We need a process for support that is the same every hour of the day, so that we deliver consistent, quality services all the time,” Housego says. “The size of our support operation – we have 80 support analysts in an overall staff of 350 – and the volume of calls meant that to get that consistency it was time to consolidate and improve our Help Desk infrastructure.”

The company went through a buy vs. build analysis on their various sytems, eventually deciding that it required the benefits of an off-theshelf package offering easy customisation, plus scalability to ensure that service operated at a high level even during tax season.

FrontRange’s HEAT software package met the company’s requirements. “We had an existing relationship with FrontRange and knew that HEAT was highly customisable. It was also good to go with a vendor who could offer a clear roadmap of future capabilities."

Today, the company has a single Help Desk infrastructure covering all products and all teams, an arrangement it finds delivers consistency of measurement that allows it to set more effective key performance indicators to improve staff performance and the quality of service.

Understanding how individual agents tackle problems is also proving more than useful.

“Two different support analysts might get the same call about the same problem. By analysing their individual approach we can see which was more effective and determine what is the best outcome,” says Housego. All Help Desk staff can then utilise this for future calls.

The new Help Desk is even influencing the way the company develops its products, Housego says.

“If analysis of calls shows us a pattern of issues with a certain screen in a piece of software we can chat to our developers and say ‘let’s rethink the way the install routine works’ or suggest that usability for the screen in question could be improved because we’re getting high call volumes on this issue.”

Insights like this generated from Help Desk data are now formally used in the company’s development cycle.

Other plans for the new system include increased use of self-service. This is an important method of interacting with clients as it provides 24/7 facilities. However, Housego believes that personal client interaction will remain a key part of Solution 6’s support delivery.

“Self-service over the Web allows clients to search for their own answers - which is often faster - and provides access to information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is also valuable because the client states the issue in their own words instead of us writing down the issue,” he says.

The person-to-person interaction with Solution 6’s analysts remains an important part of the process however. “Clients want us to be there for them,” Housego says. “With our systems we are able to provide the best of both world’s - clients can go to the web for non-urgent matters and we will always be there for them when they really need to talk to someone for critical matters.”

One tool the company will use as part of that process is HEAT. “The critical part of self-service is giving customers transparency into jobs. HEAT does that by giving clients the information they want to see describing where we are at in terms of solving their particular issue.”

And with the ability to measure the progress of web inquiries as easily as it can measure phone inquiries, Solution 6 feels that it can continually improve its service into the future.

“We needed to understand the amount of work that comes in because resourcing decisions are driven by traffic patterns. HEAT lets us do that and helps us understand how to offer better service when the same call comes in tomorrow.”

“Client satisfaction with our support services has improved continuously over the last 18 months, which is a great outcome for us and our clients.”

November 2003