The Impact

The COVID-19 crisis has changed the world order. People all over the world are practicing social distancing. Employees including support staff are compelled to work from home instead of working in normal office environment.

Covid-19 has impacted IT support in many ways:

  • Business continuity Impact

    • Organizations had to immediately exercise the BCP

  • Impact on the workforce

    • The workforce had to be shifted to their home locations because of statewide locked down

  • Service Desk Operation Impact

    • Sudden surge on service desk tickets due to end-users working remotely

    • Impact on SLA’s, Customer Experience and MTTR

  • IT Infrastructure Impact

    • Capacity and performance of collaborative tools, VPN and Security considerations

We have been mainly supporting our US customers who are affected by Covid-19 as well.  Here is a typical graph of service desk tickets received from one of our customers between the periods of February – March 2020.

As you can see clearly the ticket volume doubled in month of March 2020. Majority of the issues logged have been password resets, VPN not working, access to share folders, etc.

Steps Taken

We immediately took following steps to cope of with this change.

  • We ensured all support staff are safe with Free Covid-19 AppBots

  • Made sure team is properly equipped tools (laptops, internet connectivity, etc.) and enabled them for work from home.

  • We are keeping the motivation high by constant encouragement and communication with the team.

  • We quickly increased support staff during customer business hours along with virtual workers (Bots) as part of our operational model (servicerize.com).

  • We are using the same collaborative tools which customer is using (e.g. Microsoft Teams) to communicate with end-users.

  • Calling facilities are enabled via Microsoft Teams as well as using Skype especially for international calls.

  • Google meet is used for internal collaboration for daily huddles.

  • We have regular governance meetings with the customer stake holders.

  • Tool such as “GoToAssist” is used for remote desktop support in case support staff needs to take control of the end-user desktop.

  • We enabled “self-service” using chatbot support and knowledge articles with FAQs.

  • Our automation engine is auto-fulfilling the common requests such as: Password resets, VPN troubleshooting, distribution list additions, share folder access.

Results

We have managed over 2000 tickets and 100% work orders successfully with 94% SLA adherence within span of 4 weeks. We have reduced MTTR with automation using ServiceRize bots (from hours to minutes). We managed to keep customer satisfaction at high levels due to use of chatbots, emails and avoiding long wait queues over the phones.

A major success has been due to our innovative operating model (www.servicerize.com) of the creative combination of bots (virtual agents) and human staff. The model helps you to expand easily if there is a surge in ticket volume which was the case in the present situation. Besides easy expansion, you have benefits such as reduced TAT, enhancing customer experience, reduced cost of operations, etc.

Please contact us at [email protected] for information on our “ServiceRize” services.

About the Author

Prashant Deshpande

Prashant heads global delivery of Vyom Labs consisting of various practice units such as BMC and ServiceRize. Prashant has illustrious career over thirty years in information technology and has served at senior executive levels with global companies such as: IBM, BMC, Veritas and Citibank.
Prashant has built, scaled and managed various IT, professional services & product development/support organizations.
His technical expertise is in IT infrastructure management, automation and managed services. He is passionate about business transformation using cognitive technologies such as AI and machine learning.