Outsourced IT support – operational changes

In September, we made a very significant change to our business by partnering with LiveVHD and having them serve the “Tier 1” support role for our customers. All our reactive support requests go to them first and they are tasked with either completing the required work or escalating the work to our tier 2 support team.

With any change and, in particular, with a large change like this, there are going to be lots of learning opportunities in the early stages. LiveVHD has exceeded our expectations and recently ranked higher than almost all our other “departments” with a 4.4 (out of 5) on a comprehensive customer annual survey. However, we have seen many opportunities to enhance our operations with LiveVHD and have done so. I thought it would make for an interesting read to see how we were able to improve things.

Here is a list of the operational changes we have recently made:

• LiveVHD is sent an automatic reminder email after one hour when a new service order has been created and the customer has not yet been contacted.
• LiveVHD and our Tier 2 team are sent a reminder email after two hours. (We are currently developing a way to have these aging Service Orders be automatically escalated to tier 2)
• Multiple automated emails are sent to our clients as their service order(s) moves through various statuses in our system. This allows clients better visibility into the work they have requested of us. For those that don’t like the “spam”, we can turn these automated emails off (or partially off) on request (we automatically turned these off for high volume clients).
• We have redefined many of the statuses in our system to help track the current state of a Service Order at LiveVHD. For example, ‘In Progress’ means that LiveVHD is currently working on the Service Order.
• We have designated one central point of contact at LiveVHD for clients (Anthony Woods), and a more dedicated team of technicians than before.
• Clients may now request a specific technician at LiveVHD, with the caveat that they don’t mind waiting a little longer until their favourite tech is free.
• Improved email templates that are more informative to both clients and our team.

As always, we’d love feedback from clients so that we can continue to improve.