How to make 40,000 problems disappear
And other tales from Sense and Respond.
Once upon a time, the world’s biggest food service retailer changed helpdesk partners. They asked the new one to deal with all the IT problems at their 1,300 restaurants across Ireland and the UK.
“You must, of course, meet very tough SLAs”, said the restauranteur. Calls must be answered within a few seconds and if problems are business-critical, they must be fixed within 15 minutes, even in our far-flung restaurants.”
“We agree”, said the new helpdesk partner. “But can we also use our Sense and Respond methodology, so that we fix problems permanently?”
The restaurateur knew that a call to the helpdesk meant just one thing – there was a problem in a restaurant – so he was delighted to agree.
In the first year of the contract, the new helpdesk realised that almost 30% of calls weren’t about an IT failure at all, but were from staff members who didn’t know how to do something on the IT equipment. So they produced the ‘Restaurant Technology Guide’ to explain to staff how to use their systems.
Many other calls were about printer problems – the grill printer in the kitchen in particular. The restaurateur was advised to check the grill printer and its cabling in each restaurant.
What happened? Well, in 2003, 15,000 fewer calls were made to the helpdesk (that’s more than ten problems per restaurant eliminated) and in 2004, another 25,000 calls simply didn’t happen.
Altogether, that’s 40,000 restaurant problems that just disappeared into thin air, thanks to the magic of Sense and Respond.
The story of the £250 keyboard
Once upon a time, there was an IT support contract that seemed to work very well. Whenever people had a problem, they would call a number and an operator on the helpdesk would find an expert who could fix things as quickly as possible.
Users and their employer were quite happy with the service, and it seemed like a perfectly good way to deal with the inevitable problems that a large business, with a big IT system would encounter.
One day, when the support contract came up for renewal, a potential new helpdesk supplier had a look at what was happening and asked some rather unexpected questions, among which was:
“Why do you keep paying £250 for new keyboards?”
You see, the hopeful new supplier had spotted this: A number of times each year, calls from the customer’s London HQ would involve broken keyboards and, in line with the SLA in the contract, the helpdesk operator would call out an engineer, so that users could get back to work as soon as possible.
After receiving the alarm call, the engineer would get into his van, drive across the city, pass through the user’s security systems, go to the right office and employ his years of training to expertly plug a new keyboard into the hole at the back of the computer.
Cost: around £250.
So the new supplier suggested a rather less expensive solution – why don’t you carry a stock of keyboards (about £40 each) in a cupboard at the office, so your people can deal instantly with their own replacements?
“What a good idea!” exclaimed the prospective customer. “Got any more like that?”
“It seems to take rather a long time to reset your users’ passwords”, said the new supplier…
The lost password and the fast moving organisation
Once upon a time, there was an international news business that kept priceless archives and references for its journalists on an Oracle database.
Sensibly, the database was protected by passwords. Predictably, journalists forgot them. In fact 14% of calls to the IT helpdesk were for password resets!
The old way of dealing with this involved a wait of up to eight hours for a technical expert with system admin privileges to call back and restore access. Yes, in one of the fastest-moving businesses on earth, some people were unable to reach vital information for an entire working day.
Happily, a new helpdesk supplier came on the scene (who used a unique system called Sense and Respond) and suggested a solution.
Why not stop this being a helpdesk issue at all by putting reset instructions and capabilities online? Oh yes, and why not also put those instructions on the home page of your intranet, and make it big, red and flashy so that busy people notice it’s there?”
“OK”, said the international news organisation, and now password resets are done almost instantly, journalists no longer waste up to eight hours a time and the new helpdesk (which receives at least 14% fewer calls) can get on with helping.
Fancy that – a helpdesk that doesn’t want lots of calls!
