Success Stories
Service Desk Restructuring
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Business Need
A large insurance regulator was experiencing multiple challenges within the Service Desk Area. First, fully training new resources required a significant time and resource investment, which compounded the on-boarding process. Second, a new Help Desk service offering (Life Insurance Policy Locator Service) caused a significant increase in calls/requests for service. Third, the company was operating significantly below set staffing levels.
Services Provided
Core Catalysts performed a variety of tasks to provide the required services to the company.
- Interviews
- Core Catalysts interviewed key resources within the Service Desk, as well as internal Service Desk customers from other departments, to determine what was and wasn’t working well.
- These interviews helped Core Catalysts learn how the Service Desk historically operated, which aided in understanding the environmental dynamics of the organization as a whole.
- The result of these interviews was the uncovering of potential areas of improvement, such as in the Service Desk’s response time, self-help services, and so on.
- Data Analysis
- Core Catalysts pulled raw data from Jira, one of the Service Desk’s primary tools.
- This data was used to identify several important metrics, such as the Service Desk’s most common issue, the average time to resolve an issue, and what issues take the most or least amount of time to resolve, etc.
- Using these metrics, Core Catalysts determined how issues could be more effectively routed to the right analyst, as well as what issues could be moved from hands-on help to self-help.
- Technology Analysis
- Core Catalysts conducted a full review of the Service Desk’s toolset, primarily focused on Jira.
- This review included analyses of how analysts actually performed their job functions.
- Using the above, Core Catalysts determined how waste could be eliminated and efficiency could be increased
- Resource Analysis
- All Service Desk Analyst positions were reviewed, including Managers, Supervisors, and Temporary/Intern Analysts.
- These reviews were conducted as comparisons between the positions’ roles as defined by HR and their actual workloads.
- The HR hiring process was also reviewed, leading Core Catalysts to find ways to temporarily overcome historical delays in both the offer process and the on-boarding process.
Value Provided
The interview process uncovered multiple wants and needs from both the internal Service Desk resources and Service Desk customers. Core Catalysts guided the company in providing more Self-Help services, allowing customers to address some of their easier issues, such as password resets, more quickly. In addition, Core Catalysts negotiated with Level 2 support to find ways to automatically address the more complicated issues that are initially routed through the Service Desk. As a whole, the company was able to adjust the initial incoming priority for specific issue types based on the input of internal customers from other departments.
The data analysis allowed Core Catalysts to target very specific service requests so that they could be addressed based on specific data points. Password resets and change requests were far and way the largest source of support tickets. This was one of the first targets to be justified for automation, which cut down on the Service Desk workload significantly. In addition, the service requests that require Level 2 support were identified and processes were put in place to automatically route these requests straight to the proper support, rather than being filtered through the front desk first. This was done in tandem with the identification and categorization of Low, Medium, and High priority service categories. These efforts helped Core Catalysts develop routing within Jira to the appropriate skill-leveled Service Desk Analyst.
The technology analysis allowed Core Catalysts to help the company determine how their system could be developed or changed to optimize work efficiency. This was coupled with the resource analysis to define the roles and responsibilities of each position more clearly within the department. This was both critically important and used in conjunction with the data analysis to help the company map service requests to the appropriate Service Desk Analyst.