InVADE’s reputation and success has been won on the quality of our solution and the responsiveness and technical abilities of the Customer Service Desk. This is down to a combination of software telephony expertise and a deep understanding of Market Research operations. The Customer Service Desk and Development work closely together on best practice, quality assurance and diagnostics to aid problem identification and resolution, so much so that we are confident to stand behind the SLA’s we provide.
Best Practice Processes
Today’s Information Technology (IT) environment encompasses a large range of processes, which deliver services and products to the customer. To ensure the effective delivery of these services and products, an integrated service framework is required. One such framework with well-defined supporting processes is Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) (www.itil.co.uk). ITIL is a series of best practice guidelines in IT management. It was developed in the late 80’s when IT professionals gathered to develop a comprehensive life cycle for all areas of IT Service Management. This resulted in a common set of terminology for the IT team to put services into business terms and align them with key objectives.
This non-proprietary framework consists of a number of interrelated processes that provide an end-to-end perspective to IT service provision, with the aim to drive continuous improvement. Today, many industry leaders recognize ITIL as the de facto world standard in IT Service Management.
Service Management is defined by ITIL as “the process of maintaining and gradually improving business aligned IT service quality, through constant cycle of agreeing, monitoring, reporting and reviewing IT service achievements and through instigating actions to eradicate unacceptable levels of service.”
Since the mid 90’s, ITIL has had a proven track record with corporations and governments worldwide, examples include Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, AXA and ABN AMRO.
The benefits of using ITIL include:
IT services meeting business requirements i.e. the IT effort is focused on assisting InVADE to achieve its strategic objectives;
Improvements in the efficiency and quality of service delivery;
Clear understanding of service delivery and support priorities;
Improved relationships between customers, IT and vendors;
Service level management improving the lines of communication between IT and their customers; and
Monitoring of service delivery facilitates identification of areas of process weakness.
ITIL is a critical component in supporting the successful deployment and utilization of our software. InVADE is proud of our best practice process driven framework we use to support the day-to-day operations. Our 3 best practice core aims are discussed below.
Incident Management
“To restore normal service operation as quickly as possible with minimum disruption to the customer, thus ensuring that the best achievable levels of availability and service be maintained.”
The benefits to the organization and customer of following an ITIL based incident management process are:
Improved monitoring, allowing performance against Service Level Agreement (SLA) to be accurately measured;
Improved management information on aspects of service quality;
Better staff utilization, leading to greater efficiency;
Elimination of lost or incorrect Incidents and service requests;
More accurate Configuration Management Database (CMDB) information (giving an on-going audit while registering incidents); and
Improved User and Customer satisfaction.
Problem Management
“To minimize the adverse effect to the customer of incidents and problems caused by errors in the infrastructure, and to proactively prevent the occurrence of incidents, problems, and errors.”
The benefits of taking a formal approach to Problem Management include the following:
Improved IT service quality. Problem Management helps generate a cycle of rapidly increasing IT service quality. High-quality reliable service is good for the business users of IT, and good for the productivity and morale of the IT service providers.
Incident volume reduction. Problem Management is instrumental in reducing the number of Incidents that interrupt the conduct of business.
Permanent solutions. There will be a gradual reduction in the number and impact of problems and known errors as those that are resolved stay resolved.
Improved organizational learning. The Problem Management process is based on the concept of learning from past experience. The process provides the historical data to identify trends, and the means of preventing failures and of reducing the impact of failures, resulting in improved user productivity.
Better first-time fix rate at the Customer Service Desk, Problem Management enables a better first time fix rate of Incidents at the Customer Service Desk, achieved via the capture, retention and availability of Incident resolution and work-around data within a knowledge database available to the Customer Service Desk at call logging.
Change Management
“To ensure that standardized methods and procedures be used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes, in order to minimize the impact of any related incidents upon service.”
Specific benefits of an effective Change Management system include:
Better alignment of IT services to business requirements.
Increased visibility and communication of Changes to both business and service-support staff.
Improved risk assessment.
A reduced adverse impact of Changes on the quality of services and on SLA’s.
Better assessment of the cost of proposed Changes before they are incurred.
Fewer Changes that have to be backed-out, along with an increased ability to do this more easily when necessary.
Improved problem and Availability Management through the use of valuable management information relating to changes accumulated through the Change Management process.
Increased productivity of Users – through less disruption and, higher-quality services.
Increased productivity of key personnel through less need for diversion from planned duties to implement urgent Changes or back-out erroneous Changes.
Greater ability to absorb a large volume of Changes.
An enhanced business perception of IT through an improved quality of service and a professional approach.”
How we deliver our customer experience.
All communications between InVADE and clients are tracked, logged, and reviewed. We constantly monitor all our operations cumulatively, leading to a review of our service with our customers on a minimum of every quarter and further more when necessary with the Technical Account Manager.
At InVADE, we achieve the best customer experience possible using our key tool Vision (http://www.visionproject.se). Vision is developed and owned by Visionera AB, an innovative software company based in Stockholm, Sweden. Visionera AB was founded in 2001 and the development of Vision started in 2003.
Vision has been selected and successfully used in thousands of projects, in more than 40 countries all over the world.
Vision immediately and positively affects the way InVADE interacts with our customers. The customer support desk portal is easy to access and intuitive to use and through it we centrally manage all of our customer support channels: portal, telephone, system raised or live chat.
We give the client full visibility of all tickets raised and provide customers with self-service support in the form of Knowledge Base articles and Troubleshooting Wizards. InVADE also use’s the support portal to provide important company and product news.
SLA Priority and Escalation
Invade support offers the following Service Level Agreements and escalations based upon the issue priority set by the customer in the Vision support portal. All times are “working hours” where the InVADE Normal Support Hours are Monday to Friday 0900 – 1700 Local to customer site time.
InVADE uses the following classifications and where working hours are indicated; these will be within the parameters set within the contracted SLA except where issues are classified as Level 1, in which case work will continue outside of normal working hours irrespective of the contracted SLA:
Level 1
An issue that causes complete loss of service of the dialler or where the dialler is significantly impaired to the point where transactions cannot be completed and work cannot be reasonably continued.
These issues should be marked as “Emergency” in support portal, and InVADE personnel will commence investigation within two working hours, or within four hours 24/7.
Level 2
Issue causes a partial loss of service to the dialler. No acceptable workaround has been implemented by the customer but operations may continue in a limited capacity.
Issues marked “High” priority in the Support Portal and InVADE personnel will commence investigation within four working hours.
Level 3
Problem causes a minor loss of service or inconvenience or is a request for enhancement or new software feature.
For issues marked as “Medium” investigation will commence within 8 working hours with feasibility and cost estimations provided by Invade within 4 working days of the initial response from Invade if enhancements or new features are requested. Issues that fall into the category of an enhancement or feature request will be manually reclassified as “Feature Requests” by Invade staff within the Support Portal.
Escalation Pathway
1st line on average resolves 60% of all issues, each of our engineers are trained to a high standard and have access to our extensive internal knowledge base. (Loss of connection, user error or issues relating to service provider / 3rd Party)
2nd Line on average resolves 35% of all escalated tickets, where 1st line is unable to resolve. Any issue escalated to is reviewed internally to constantly improve our 1st line response efficacy.
3rd line on average resolves 5% of all escalated tickets (most escalations to 3rd line are software issues or requests for update / enhancements)
The Operation Manager will respond directly to enquiries regarding the SLA and will provide quarterly reviews based on operational reports (ticket lead / response / resolution times, quality of ticket response etc.).
InVADE will also monitor all tickets for potential customer training issues such as repeated user error and 3rd party supplier issues. Working with the Technical Account Manager InVADE will constantly review its relationship with the customer and monitor areas where we can improve our levels of service.
Where the issue falls outside the scope of our support and SLA the Technical Account Manager will communicate such information to the client. In most cases this relates to the customers own 3rd party suppliers, where InVADE will endeavor to aid the parties in reaching a speedy resolution.
In the unlikely event that the customer remains unhappy with our process, we will refer this to the InVADE Managing Director.
The following diagram illustrates the internal and external escalation path for InVADE. Most issues are resolved within the scope of 1st and 2nd line support as stated above.
