Midsized manufacturer improves Service Desk metrics and reduces cost

Case Study

“On boarding for the service desk could not have gone better.”

– Vice-President of IT

Requirements

A midsized U.S. manufacturer was growing and adding employees, which was outstripping the capacity of their in-house team of IT technicians providing user support. The support model was informal and lacked tools and processes to manage tickets and automate routine tasks, such as password resets. At the same time, the users needed onsite support in their manufacturing plant from technicians knowledgeable about their devices and environment.

By finding an external service provider to provide user support, they hoped to free-up their more senior and leadership-level resources, who were spending too much time resolving user support incidents. Overall, they recognized that they needed a more structured user support model.

As they began searching for a partner to assist them with their service desk and field support, they evaluated ten prospective service providers. Initially they looked for whether the service provider was even really listening to their needs, rather than just pushing a canned service or product. Following this, their main criteria were:

• Flexibility – Would the service provider craft a solution that would meet the company’s specific needs, or did they only have a “one size fits all” offering?
• Right shoring – Did the service provider provide right shoring options incorporating onshore, near-shore, and off-shore capabilities that could be brought to bear according to their needs?
• Scalability – Could the solution cost-effectively scale up and down?
• Seamlessness – Could the service provider act as a seamless extension of the company’s team and be nearly transparent to the users?

Of course, cost savings were also definitely important. They wanted a support model that would provide improved service levels at a lower cost. They did not want, however, a low-cost solution that was weak in meeting their other needs.

Following their evaluation, they determined that only Celsior was adequately flexible to address all their requirements.

Solution

Celsior proposed transforming their end-user IT support to a managed service desk with extended business day coverage plus after-hours on-call support, effectively providing support for 24×7 operations. To handle field support, Celsior was able to rebadge current personnel as Celsior employees. The solution was based on the Celsior Technology Operations solution stack – an approach that allowed the company to co-create with Celsior an end-user support solution that included tools, processes, and appropriate SLAs.

A key intent was to make the move as seamless as possible. The company wanted to transition their in-house service desk to a managed service desk without any of their users realizing initially that a transition had been made. This objective was met to the company’s delight.

At the same time, with a phased approach and a combination of on-site and remote support, Celsior closed the gap between the service level the company had been providing and what they wanted to provide.

Result

The new, managed service desk has met or exceeded all SLAs. The company reported that they are now getting improved service desk metrics that they had never achieved. Personnel offloaded through the move to an outside service provider are now able to focus on more strategic, higher-value endeavors. At the same time, the matured support processes have improved user experience and satisfaction. CSAT scores have been 4.9 out 5. The vice-president of IT stated that “Onboarding for the service desk could not have gone better”.

The success has not just been in service levels and employee satisfaction. Based on the managed service desk and an accompanying Celsior-provided solution for end point management, IT has achieved a dramatic cut in costs. Four years ago, they had 21 people in IT. Now they are down to only 9 FTEs. Annual IT savings are $200k—a significant number for a midsized company.

And, as the VP of IT pointed out, as they significantly reduced the cost of the end user services, they got a significantly better product.

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