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How can you more quickly qualify and evaluate any cloud vendor?

This white paper is designed to reduce the complexity of the cloud buying process by providing twenty penetrating questions to ask cloud vendors to become a more informed buyer. Customers interested in purchasing any cloud service (for example, IT help desk or customer service) encounter a myriad of problems and obstacles during the purchase process. The white paper provides practical "how to" advice to help avoid mistakes that even the most experienced professionals make that cost a lot of time and money. Use these questions to poke and prod at your list of cloud vendors.

Methodology for Optimizing Help Desk & Customer Service/Call Center Staffing to Save Money

This is an outline of the White Paper:

Call Flow Design - Understanding the Different Strategies

• Gate Keeper Model
• Call Sorting Model
• Tiered Structure: Specialist Model
• Tiered Structure: Generalist Model

Financial Impact of the Various Models

How Many Help Desk Staff Are Required For Your Call Volume?

• Determining Direct Labor Requirements
• Determining the Number of Potential Direct Labor Hours Available
• Utilization Rate
• Sample Formulas

Measure and Forecast Cost Savings Attributable to Increases in First Call Resolution

Giva's first call resolution excel calculator tool allows CIOs and VPs of Customer Service to accurately forecast the cost benefits of programs to increase first call resolution such as using a knowledge base, investing in level 1 training, hiring more skilled level 1 personnel, etc.

The direct benefit of improved FCR is significant cost savings. Although hard to quantify, the indirect benefits are equally compelling:

• Mean time to resolution is decreased, improving end-user productivity
• Customer satisfaction increases
• Up-tier resources can concentrate on higher level tasks, optimizing system performance and speeding other projects to ROI and completion
• Job satisfaction improves for both Level 1 and Level 2 engineers
• Relations between teams improve
• Level 1 credibility builds, increasing utilization and opening the door for additional FCR opportunities

Help Desk First Call Resolution (FCR)

Techniques to Improve First Call Resolution

First call resolution (FCR) is one of the standard help desk metrics to evaluate performance because resolution timeliness is a major factor in customer satisfaction. It is an important metric to measure the success the help desk is having resolving routine requests.

This white paper contains a case study of a client who engaged on-site help desk services with CDC Global Services. The client was receiving 3,000 calls to their help desk per month due to a desktop, server, and messaging migration and their FCR dropped as low as 35%.

This 25 Question Assessment Excel provides a simple and quick method for gauging the maturity level of your Service Desk/Help Desk

This Service Desk/Help Desk Assessment Excel tool has 5 sections:

• Processes & Best Practices-How well defined and documented are the Service Desk/Help Desk processes?
• Organizational Integration-Is the Service Desk/Help Desk a valuable contributor to organization success?
• Technology Optimization-How mature are technology solutions?
• Staff Development-What is the professional level and commitment of the Service Desk/Help Desk staff?
• Information Management-How well does the Service Desk/Help Desk utilize metrics for customer satisfaction, call reduction, root cause and self-improvement?

It is always difficult to quickly pull together interview questions that get at the heart of how you may want to measure candidates. Also, what are some possible answers to expect?

This whitepaper is a rich collection of questions to ask during interviews.

Click on Interview Questions and Answers - Sample Interview Questions

Categories

1. Telephone Pre-Screen Interview Questions
2. Behavioral Interview Questions
3. Interpersonal Interview Questions
4. Creative Thinking Interview Questions
5. General Interview Questions
6. Managerial Interview Questions
7. Executive Interview Questions
8. Functional Interview Questions
9. Sales Interview Questions
10. Example Questions and Possible Answers for Interviews
11. Sample Diversity Interview Questions
12. Productivity/Time Management Questions
13. Quality Interview Questions
14. Learning Interview Questions
15. Teamwork Interview Questions
16. Managing Change Interview Questions
17. Problem/Analysis Solving Interview Questions

"Who should I reward, who should I warn and who should I terminate?"

Outstanding leaders identify "High Leverage Points" & invest effort/time in those respective areas.

Outstanding leaders focus on "high leverage points" where they can make changes and exert influence. High leverage points provide a disproportionately higher payback for every unit of effort/time invested vs. low leverage or no leverage points. Said another way..they want a big bang for buck for effort/attention so they look for high leverage activities where they can have a big impact.

High Leverage Points: A law firm or hospital internal IT help desk will have significant influence on the productivity of attorneys and health care professionals which are revenue producers for their respective entities.…it's a high leverage point. Another example is a customer service organization since it has significant influence on customer decisions to purchase more products/services. Customer facing personnel are in a very influential/critical position. Sales people generate revenue, but excellent customer service people keep customers coming back with their checkbooks…or not coming back.

Why are metrics/KPIs important for the IT help desk and customer service organizations?

Increase Customer Satisfaction - Excellent help desk leaders understand root cause analysis so they can take systemic steps to reduce overall call volume and increase customer satisfaction. They carefully measure not only the call type, but also why calls actually occur. Leaders determine the underlying reasons behind customer inquiries. This has to be extremely well understood in order to decrease call volume and ultimately increase customer satisfaction.

Highlight Relative Performance – Excellent help desk leaders draw key distinctions between the performance of people and groups for objective incentive programs. Linking incentive programs to subjective criteria will destroy morale in any organization. Without objective measures, favoritism, personality and politics rule instead of performance. Circulate the name(s) of winners along with a copy of the report(s)/metric(s) documenting why the they won and how everybody else performed. Can’t improve if can’t measure! Increase individual and group morale with metrics.

Internal & External Benchmarking - Excellent help desk leaders benchmark their companies against the industry and direct competitors for continuous improvement and call reduction. Easy to get industry data, but need to collect data about your company with your call tracking system to compare with industry data.

Financial - Excellent help desk leaders measure performance to generate resource allocation plans, balance workloads, balance headcount and make business cases for capital and operating expenses. Tie your team’s performance to revenue as much as possible. How many revenue producers did the support organization kept productive? How happy are out customers so they keep on buying?

Everyday you have to show the world you’re smart, competent and deserve your paycheck every 2 weeks. Metrics can help you keep your job, dept. headcount & budgets. A business case is needed for resources…no better way than with metrics. Objective data will dictate most decisions in today’s economic environment.

Make sure to see our IT help desk & customer service whitepaper library.