"Reducing the call volume - what options are there?"
(Horst Eckel, Group Leader IT Service-Desk, DZ BANK AG)
The challenge
As a company grows, so does the number of service desk customers. A rethink is required in order to perfectly handle 5,000 customers with 14 employees, who generate 80,000 tickets and a multiple of calls every year. We wanted to grow together with the growing requirements. To do this, we had to look for ways to inform our customers more effectively in order to generate more time for the essentials by avoiding calls.
Goal
To enable our service desk staff to focus on the essentials, i.e. rectifying a fault, we have to drastically reduce the number of calls, especially in the event of mass faults. It was clear that we would have to inform our customers differently in order to achieve this. Previously, we used established methods such as intranet messages, e-mail distribution lists and telephone announcements. When we realized that a perfectly informed customer would not only feel well taken care of, but would also no longer call as a result of his knowledge, we knew where we had to start.
Implementation
With the IBI-aws software, we were able to implement a tool that met and in some cases exceeded our expectations.
A tool that can quickly and accurately place fault information directly on the desktop of only affected customers. In order to make optimum use of the tool, we identified our top 20 applications in an initial survey, interviewed the application managers, recorded the experiences of the service desk and created notification templates.
For speed, we have stored notification templates in IBI-aws for the most important applications, faults, information, updates and troubleshooting. For accuracy, IBI-aws offered the ability to select notices by application, window title, Active Directory objects/attributes, IP address ranges and email addresses.
Benefits
With IBI-aws, we now only inform customers who are actually affected by the failure of an application or a planned maintenance interruption.
To illustrate this, here is an example of our telephone queue that had formed due to a Lotus Notes server failure. In this case, around 1,500 employees were unable to process their emails or could only do so very slowly. As always, we had informed them with an intranet message, via e-mail and a telephone announcement.
We were able to communicate exactly the same case a little later with an IBI-aws message and a supplementary telephone announcement. The difference could not have been more drastic.
Not only have we been able to reduce the call volume to a minimum, but we have also been able to significantly increase the satisfaction of our customers and our service desk staff.
Thanks to the excellent selection, we were able to raise our customers' awareness of the important messages.
Because: Only when one of our customers receives a notification is he actually affected.