Followup Calls on the Global Helpdesk

[viv121]

Hello , I have a question and Ineed your help . We are a large organization and we have presence across the globe. To support the IT structure of my organization, we have set several region based yet offshored IT Service Desks. We have Service Desks based out of India and we support US, UK , Middle East and Australasia at the moment .In order to improve our FTE and Desk utilization, we are planning to form a Global IT Helpdesk based on Incident category rather than region . For example we want to publich one helpdesk number for the entire group and the end users would be given the liberty to dial the number options for the kind of support they require .We are adhering to PRINCE2 as much as we can and our guys are undergoing cultural and technical training to meet the upcoming requirements. We already have a set of Helpdesk analysts who can man the queues for desktop support, laptop support, home worker/remote worker support, email client support etc. We are expecting an extraordinary FCR out of this venture. However, the pain area is the follow-up calls made by the users . We unfortunately can't have specialists to take up these followup calls. Also, creating a queue for thefollowups would make a negative impact to the users. The follow-up calls constitute close to twenty five percent of all calls. We have done all we could to reduce the follow-up calls by publishing our SLAs and encouraging the users to use the web view tro check the ticket status. It has helped but not to the desired levels. Can you please suggest the best way to handle the follow up calls in a virtual, global helpdesk environment ?

Merry Christmas to all and a Wonderful new Year ahead .

Regards

Viv

[dboylan]

My suggestion would be to have the VRU ask if the caller if they are calling about a previously reported issue. If they respond that it is (push 1, say "yes", etc) then they would then be prompted to enter their ticket number. The ticket number would then key the VRU to route the call to the appropriate skilled Service Desk.

If the user doesn't have a ticket number, they are routed to an Unskilled Service Desk that searches the Incident database for their ticket and updates it with their comments/questions.

It should become apparent to the users that knowing the ticket number gets them routed to skilled analysts. Not knowing their ticket number gets them routed to someone who will simply make notes.

This all assumes that your VRU can integrate to the Incident database in such a way that the VRU can route a call based on the categorization of a queried ticket number.

Don

[viv121]

Dear Don,

Much appreciated. It looks like most feasible ways of achieving some degree of service with the user followup calls. However, the limitation at the moment is that our ticketing tool generates random and sequential tickets. We can give it a try to assign unique numbers for the tickets for example DTXXXXX for Desktop related issues and LTXXXXX for Laptop related issues. we can then begin ticket based call routing for the follow up calls. This all looks a bit complicated but yet achievable.

Regards

Vivek