Support with an eye on ITIL

The Telemarketing Company calls on SupportDesk to upgrade user support and ensure best practice

Background

Established in 1990 and based in Brighton, The Telemarketing Company is the largest 100 per cent outbound business-to-business telemarketing agency in the UK.

With a client list including well-known brands and organisations such as American Express, The British Library, Cadbury Schweppes, Deloitte and Innocent Drinks, The Telemarketing Company provides bespoke telephone marketing services via its 180-strong call centre team. Services provided include appointment setting and lead generation to database cleansing, customer profiling and readership/circulation management.

The call centre itself runs on a Microsoft server 2003 and Microsoft SQL server-based infrastructure. For compliance, quality control and training purposes, calls are digitally recorded and archived in MP3 format.

While offering additional technical services such as automated database synchronisation or application development, the majority of The Telemarketing Company’s work is undertaken from data provided by its customers. Data security and safety is therefore key – servers and equipment are securely housed and are protected by multiple redundancy systems, with uninterruptible power and humidity and temperature monitoring.

The Problem

The call centre team members use a combination of software to manage their contacts and campaigns. For contact management they use ACT! and Maximiser, while communications and administration are handled by Microsoft Office applications.

The company has also developed Campaign Loader, a bespoke campaign management tool that works in conjunction with the contact databases to control and manage each individual client campaign.

With five technical support staff in the IT team who answer around 300 support queries per month, the company was looking for a way to improve efficiency in the support process. It also wanted to bring its procedures more in line with IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practice, according to Geoff Balmont, IT manager at The Telemarketing Company.

“We wanted to ensure we were bringing the company in line with the ITIL framework’s best practice guidelines, as well as report on how effective we are as a department,” commented Balmont. “We chose SupportDesk as it ensured we could match ITIL expectations. It also allowed us to be flexible with how many of the team would use it, as the support staff all access the same, central web-based interface.”

The Solution

SupportDesk was implemented quickly, and users were up and running with just an hour of training, according to Balmont.

“It was an extremely easy implementation, and the intuitive interface meant the team could begin to respond to requests almost immediately, and with minimal training,” he said.

The solution enabled The Telemarketing Company’s support staff to plan a number of future enhancements set to have a significant impact on the service level for users. For example, a ‘knowledge base’ is being built, containing a number of how-to guides to talk users through some of the issues or problems they may find with software packages while carrying out their day-to-day duties.

Another service, the ‘bulletin board’, has meant a far faster way to communicate with users in the event of system upgrades or downtime.

“A system failure or unscheduled outage once caused a traffic spike where people phoned the helpdesk to see what was going on,” commented Balmont. “The bulletin board means IT support staff can post incident reports or instructions straight away for everyone to see. That keeps people in the loop and less likely to panic and raise an incident with the support team.”

In addition, IT support staff are now able to more effectively monitor problems and incidents from when they are raised through to resolution. The system also provides statistics to show resolution times, performance and the workload on the department at any point in time.

The Results

Since being implemented, SupportDesk has made a significant impact on the time and accuracy of the incident resolution process. In fact, response and resolution have increased by 38% response is now running at 95% of target, while resolution is at 97%.

Balmont is also pleased with the ongoing support he has been receiving from Richmond Systems.

“Each upgrade of SupportDesk has added some benefits to the system, and Richmond has been open to our own feedback as to how to improve the product,” he added.

“We’re very impressed with the service we have received, and with Richmond Systems’ commitment to the development of the system.”

A series of user feedback questions has also revealed happy customers across the business, with a swathe of extremely complimentary comments from the end-users.

“Our user surveys have created some extremely positive feedback about the speed of resolution and helpfulness of support staff. Running SupportDesk In conjunction with our centralised configuration management solution means our call centre operatives now have a much improved and far more effective technical support service,” concluded Balmont.

About Richmond Systems

Richmond Systems are leading providers of Service Desk and IT Management solutions that enable organisations to deliver fast, effective and high quality service and support.

Founded in 1984, Richmond became a leading supplier of remote support solutions and in 1995 introduced SupportDesk, one of the first Windows™ based help desks. Key benefits of SupportDesk are its ease of use, live reporting and the speed in which it integrates in real time with complementary business applications.

Throughout its history Richmond Systems has remained focused on listening to Customers, developing products that exceed expectations and delivering excellent service and support.

For further information, including free, fully-functional trial copies and remote demonstrations of our products, please visit our website www.richmondsys.com or call +44 (0) 1428 641616.

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