KIRKLAND & ELLIS

LLP

Globalized IT Service Desk

Ellen Sittinger, Global Service Desk Manager
Joe Fousek, Customer Support Associate Director
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LLP

The History
 Six independent Help Desks in our larger offices
• Separate processes
• Self-developed procedures
• Most Help Desks also performing dispatched desk-side work
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The History
 Inability to adjust
• Unable to handle peak “system down” call volume
• 1 vacation + 1 sick = service nightmare
• Off-hours support was an expensive, distributed endeavor
• No vehicle to share lessons learned or best practices
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Motivation to Change
 First and foremost, the MONEY
 Inconsistent customer experience
 Inability to cover peaks in call volume
 After-hours cost and staff burnout
 Customer frustration with waiting for call backs
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K&E Globalization Project Goals

 Create a Service Desk where the customer experience is
consistently excellent
 To leverage resources with the end-result of reducing
expenses and providing a positive, consistent, unified
experience for all users of the firm's IT services
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K&E Globalization Project Goals

 Create and maintain Standard Operating Procedures for all
routine operations
 Develop metrics and reporting that enables us to review and
respond to trends and staff our resources for maximum
efficiency and continual service improvement
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First Establish the Play Book

 Get all staff playing from the same play book.
 We had to gather the information and start with a baseline.
 How do we do what we do?
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Prepare the Team to Be a Team

 First and foremost, entire group needs to be in synch with
their methodologies and access to knowledge
• How analysts answer the phone
• How escalations are handled
• Resources available to them
• No difference in answers dependent on analyst reached
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PSPG Framework Standardization Project

• Policies
• Policies are rules that the department imposes on others
• Blessed by upper management
• Exceptions only be executive approval
• Standards
• Rules governing departmental operations
• Standard configurations, standard service offerings, standard technologies
• Exceptions by management approval
• Procedures
• Area requiring the greatest effort
• Every process done by group
• Designed to make operational expectations clear to staff
• SOP manual is the deliverable
• Guidelines
• Loose rules like Operating Principles
• Code of conduct, etc
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Was it Easy?
 Differing opinions on the ease of building consensus
 Most just delighted to have a standard.
 Some offices believed the new standards were a step
backward
 Office culture/politics can make standards difficult
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How Did We Create Buy-in?

 We engaged local supervisors and managers to be part of
the project team
 We broke the project down into smaller pieces, and
assigned sub-projects so that people felt a sense of
ownership. However, everyone involved reviewed and
provided feedback
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How Did We Create Buy-in?

 We made it clear from the beginning that this wasn’t going
to be a home-office dictatorship.
 We reinforced the idea that this was a globalization and that
we wanted to learn how each office did things and come up
with best practices based on our findings.
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The Globalization Process

 Rolled one office in at a time
 We held training courses on the Standard Operating
Procedures and on the new phone/ACD systems
 Mock calls – to give staff the chance to get to know each
other and assure readiness, and practice new escalation
procedures
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We’ve Finished the Globalization

 In July, we finished our globalization when we added our
Hong Kong and Munich offices to our Service Desk phone
system.
 It took us approximately two months to consolidate all of
the offices (after many months of planning).
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Workflow: Requests Received Via

Telephone
 When you place a call to the Service Desk, the automatic
call distribution (ACD) system first checks the availability
of the Service Desk staff.
 If a Service Desk representative in the local office is
available to receive a call, then the call will be routed to
them.
 If no Service Desk staff member in the local office is
available, then call is then routed to the first available agent
in any of the other offices.
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Requests Received Via E-mail

 We consolidated our local email request routing and created
a new, central IT Service Desk inbox.
 Any e-mails sent to a former local office email address are
automatically routed to the globalized IT Service Desk
inbox.
 The IT Service Desk mailbox is monitored during all
business hours for the Service Desk (user benefits from
extended email coverage).
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What if a User Requires Desk Side

Assistance?
 In cases when a user’s issue requires desk side or
emergency assistance, the technician taking the call (or
responding to the email) will escalate the ticket to the user’s
home office Customer Care team.
 The issue queues are monitored by the local office
supervisor and are addressed promptly by local office
(Customer Care – feet on the street people) staff.
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How Do We Know if We’re Successful?

 Metrics drawn from:
• Automatic Call Distribution’s Call Management System
• HEAT - Incident Tracking System
• Surveys
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Key Performance Indicators

 We use weekly and monthly reports to communicate to the
staff and management and measure our progress
 We will analyze trends and adapt strategy based on data
 We are monitoring and measuring
• Call/Email volume
• Percent of call answered live
• Average speed of answering calls
• Abandoned call patterns (people that hang up)
• The following slide shows total calls and emails processed for
each office for the week
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Personal Performance Indicators

– How Do We Manage People Globally
 How many calls each analyst handled
 What each analyst’s average time was spent on a call
 Individual After Call Work time (this is time spent either
entering a HEAT ticket or continuing to work on a problem
without keeping the customer on the phone)
 How many calls were directed to each analyst but went
unanswered (and rolled over to another analyst) - RONA
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The “Aux” Report - Choosing Your Codes

 When an agent is not engaged in taking calls, how are they
spending their time?
• Lunch time
• Break time
• Helping coworkers
• Going to meetings
• Working on projects
• Monitoring incoming Email
• Attending training
 Ensuring time spent away from phone duty is appropriate
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Managing the Big Picture

 Looking at 30 minute increments, throughout the day, what
are our customers experiencing?
 What adjustments might we need to make in scheduling?
 Plotting
• Our call volume
• Staffing levels
• Maximum wait time of any call
• Abandoned calls (hang-ups)
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Coming Soon – More Metrics to be Published

 Percent of calls closed on first contact
 Average time to close tickets (SLA’s and OLA’s)
 Re-opened tickets
 Reports outlining each group’s escalation management
(OLA’s)
• Number of tickets open longer than 2, 7, and 30 days
• Re-opened tickets
• Mean time to acknowledge tickets
• Mean time to resolve tickets
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Reaping the Benefits

 20% reduction in User Support head-count
• Promotional Opportunities
• Some trimming of head-count
 Knowledge sharing across the team
 Standardized services and processes
 Metrics driven results
• Staff understanding definition of success
• Ability to compare performance across offices
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Lessons Learned
 Communicate early and often. Many of our users seemed
surprised when their call was answered by a voice they weren’t
familiar with, or someone not located in their office. While we
did communicate this, it probably wasn’t enough.
 Expect some users will not accept change (hearing an unfamiliar
voice/accent)
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Lessons Learned
 Expect that there will be processes that vary office to office
which may not have come out in the discovery phase. For us, it
was offices vary on what kind of approval is required for
accessing another user’s mailfile (calendar, address book).
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