Restructure Support Center & Recommend Tool Set

The client is a regional healthcare provider with a network of hospitals and clinics, including some of the largest public hospitals in the southeast.

The client’s internal support center lacked a well-defined service delivery model and clear criteria for business appropriate service level management. Due to inadequate staffing and a high level of effort dedicated to a variety of security and administrative functions, the support center experienced an abandon rate of over 40%. In addition, a new enterprise-wide application was about to be introduced that would require an even higher level of support. Development and integration of knowledge management was required to allow efficient support. New management in the healthcare system required a complete revamping of the support function in order to bolster staff productivity and support the rollout of this new application that was critical to its business initiatives.

The client’s goal was to create a measurable, repeatable and consistently excellent technical support offering. This was a business-critical initiative that had to be accomplished before deployment of the new enterprise-level business system.

• Restructured the support center to a three-tiered service delivery unit
  
• Recruited, trained & placed additional staff in Level 1 positions
  
• Extended support to 7-by-24
  
• While call volume increased due to extended service hours and higher customer satisfaction, reduced average wait in queue to less than 32 seconds (from over 2 minutes) and slashed abandon rate to 6%
  

• IHS assessed the service requirements, developed plans and detailed activity lists and supervised the accomplishment of the following tasks to bring operations in line with industry best practices:
  
• Restructured the existing support center
  
• Designed a tiered service-delivery model
  
• Established end-to-end service delivery model with
  
  • Operating level agreements (between support tiers)
    
  • Service Level Agreements (between end users and the support center)
    
• Identified service level targets, indicators of success and metrics for
  
  • Service desk operation
    
  • Individual performance (keyed to the operational targets, aligning individual interests to those of the organization)
    
  • Feedback to the business units on effective use of IT as a business tool
    
• Developed staff job descriptions and career planning to meet requirements of the new model; also assisted in staff evaluation and acquisition
  
• Coordinated the evaluation of CRM and Knowledge management tool sets
  
• Recommend an IP-based service delivery platform that was able to achieve far better integration of customer relationship management than more traditional CRM enterprise-level tools
  
• Assisted in developing and implementing local, installation-dependent knowledge (especially for the new business application) integrated with the recommended incident management tool