Compco

IT, network and telecom professionals attending the Tennessee Technology User’s Association (TTUA) all agreed that, as internal service providers, their departments are feeling the pinch. The complexity of IT products and services they deliver is growing while the staff to handle critical administrative tasks like move, add, change activity (a.k.a. “MAC’s”, “Change Management” or “Work Orders”) is constant or decreasing. TTUA invited  Compco’s Randy Burns to present potential solutions based on market research and his 25 years of experience in IT and Telecommunications management solutions. Burns noted that “According to market research the cost of manually receiving a MAC request is very high – as much $10 to $50 -- depending on the complexity of the request and how much difficulty the customer service rep has in contacting the customer. Clearly we need more cost effective ways of handling customer interactions. According to Hartford Hospital, Penn and others, effective customer web self service request processes can drastically reduce this cost and at the same time increase customer satisfaction.” When analyzing this opportunity three key success factors quickly emerge.

KEY #1. Customers want one place where they can request any IT, network or telecom product or and service. Customers are often perplexed and frustrated as they struggle to determine, what their choices are and who to contact for a particular need. To further compound the frustration, work groups within IT often have their own disparate tracking systems. Creating a centralized self service portal simplifies this process for the customer and creates significant cost saving opportunities. In addition, a centralized approach provides management with a comprehensive view of requests for products and services and a central place to metrics to measure performance against service level agreements.

KEY #2. Standardize the product/service offering as much as possible and provide specific web forms to capture the unique information the customer needs to provide for each type of product/service. Standardized offerings lower overall costs by increasing buying power and greatly simplify the process for the customer. Accurately capturing the basic but critical information needed to process a request not only reduces data entry time for Customer Service Rep’s, it eliminates miscommunication and slashes the time spent on in routine communication.

KEY #3. Make sure the self service forms are easy to use, offer access to in-depth product information and conform to your organizations unique terminology and business processes. Ease of use is one of the greatest determinants in the acceptance of a self service process. Design tools must provide the flexibility to streamline the customer experience wherever possible. Here are two quick examples. Menu and shopping cart choices should use business terminology that is familiar to the customer (not technical jargon). The shopping forms should group interdependent activities with easy selection using choice lists or check boxes. When the customer requests multiple line items be installed at a particular location, don’t make the customer re-enter the location each time, pre-populate the field based on the customer’s initial entry.

While the traditional centralized IT Help Desk works well for handling incidents and support issues, unfortunately these tools are often not the best choice for implementing a centralized self service MAC portal or shopping cart. MAC requests often involve multiple line items and critical data elements for each line item may need to be different (e.g. configuration details or location for installation).  Traditional help desk applications push this information into a description fields and losing the ability to do critical data validation and entry streamlining.  In addition, many central help desks are not equipped for efficient web development or customization or the costs are prohibitive.