ASG's BSP: The Ideal Solution for Upgrading Technical Customer Support

Industry: Software
Location: Florida, USA

TCS is a technical support team that serves 8,500 ASG client sites around the world. With an average of 6 to 8 customers per location, TCS handles 3,500 incidents per month.

The Challenge

TCS needed dynamic insight into what was happening within its support organization. Initially, the department's service managers relied on an assortment of daily reports and used online queries to piece together information to get answers. Because one query could return only one piece of information (e.g., or all open problem tickets for one customer), this approach was cumbersome. In addition to offering snapshots of information, standard reports were generated overnight. By the time it was received by decision makers, the information was already anywhere from 12 to 24 hours old.

Without timely information, the TCS management team had no way of identifying critical issues as they occurred. Instead, support analysts would start working on the issue and then notify management. With live phone costs ranging from $7 to $33 per call, this created significant budget pressure for the TCS team. Even when they were aware of an issue, keeping track of fast-moving issues required managers to run as many as 50 time-consuming queries, resulting in reports that were likely to contain outdated information.

Lacking a comprehensive view of each issue/incident and its current status, managers had no way to ensure that the proper attention was being devoted to each stage of the resolution process. As a result, non-critical issues were deemphasized while more attention was paid to critical incidents. Constantly changing priorities caused support analysts to inconsistently meet performance metrics. Often it was required to use additional full-time employees to meet departmental goals such as internal service-level agreements (SLAs).

ASG Solution

In March 2008, TCS implemented a customized solution using ASG's Business Service Platform™ (BSP™) for Service Desk Management as its technological core. TCS's solution integrated all aspects of IT Service Management (ITSM), including call, service request, problem, change, and asset management; SLA tracking; and enterprise notification.

For TCS, one of the deciding factors in choosing ASG's BSP was its flexible, federated technology, provided by ASG's MetaCMDB™. Using this industry-leading metadata repository, TCS pulled decision-critical data from all of its incident tracking tools, which ASG's BSP then presented in dynamic, easy-to-read dashboards.

Measurable Results

Today, the federation capability of ASG's BSP enables TCS to to use its existing reporting tools while optimizing IT investments. The solution also improves the timeliness of the team's report information. Rather than sorting through several overnight reports to discern service activity, team performance against set thresholds, and issue/incident status, TCS managers can view this crucial information on a single dashboard, in real-time.

At a glance, the TCS team knows the number of critical issues across its client base, the number of open and closed tickets, the percentage of tickets pending follow-up, and employee workload. In addition, ASG's BSP dashboards allow TCS managers to drill down to discover more detail about individual issues and incidents—by region, by team member, or by ticket. Because support analysts can access these same dashboard views, they have increased clarity and focus in resolving customer issues.

With ASG's BSP, TCS support analysts now consistently meet or exceed all of their performance goals. Because the team performs more efficiently, they can support a growing customer base without adding more employees.

TCS managers have improved their administrative efficiency in managing workloads across their support teams. Prior to the implementation of ASG's BSP, each manager spent a total of one hour per day in workload administrative time. Now it takes only three minutes daily to balance workload.

ASG's BSP has given TCS everything it needs to stay in step with ASG's rapid growth. With the solution's federated, flexible technology, TCS has a clear, comprehensive grasp of the worldwide health of its support organization. Armed with real-time, detailed insight into TCS's support environment, managers are better equipped to make strategic, on-the-spot decisions and provide world class customer service.

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