How a Flexible Help Desk Ticketing System Enables 24/7 IT Support in Offshoring
With a flexible help desk ticketing system, companies can provide 24/7 IT support in offshoring. Flexibility, backed by structure and security, is critical for successfully developing trust between remote workers and their clients.
However, it can be challenging to deliver to a dispersed network of 4,000 employees in 14 locations and 410 clients around the world. For Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies like Emapta, remote relationships – and by extension, the business model – works when clients have complete trust in the service being provided. For a staffing company, this means ensuring that the clients have consistent and reliable access to their data as well as the necessary information to evaluate service delivery quality. For Emapta CTO Henry Vassall Jones, IT is the backbone upon which this trust is built.
The Challenge: Centralising the Help Desk Ticketing System
As the CTO, Henry Vassall Jones is responsible for IT performance today and for establishing future service delivery goals. Among his objectives for the organization are achieving ISO/IEC 20000 certification which requires the implementation of a service management system. In working towards this, the team tried five solution desk systems within a three-year period of time, each of which failed to provide the flexibility that the team needed to add value to the company.
“Finding a solution was important for establishing agent workflows, identifying knowledge gaps, as well supporting the team to manage more than 10,000 IT assets. “Our goal was to first implement structured workflows in a seamless way that they would benefit our agents,” said Henry.
The Solution: Using an Industry-Leading Reporting Service
“We’d had a difficult time finding a service management solution that worked for the team, so it was really important to me that we systematically evaluate our options and be able to prove that the selected system would meet the organization’s needs today and into the future,” said Henry.
Towards that end, Emapta’s IT team began their due diligence. They selected nine possible systems and evaluated each of these against 70 criteria. Only two options proved possible: These were set up as test systems, and the team ran 45 test cases on each system. This methodical vendor selection process resulted in a decision to use OTRS, a service management software provider, in establishing workflows and 95% compliance within the organisation.
The Result: Meeting Today’s Needs, Supporting the Vision of the Future
Some of the benefits that the centralized Philippines based help desk ticketing system provided are:
- Faster response rates of up to 15 minutes after the client files the ticket.
- If a customer requires an SLA that does not match the standard system settings, Emapta can overwrite this one a case-by-case basis.
- Additionally, Emapta can supply clients with detailed reporting about the number of tickets created and SLAs met by integrating time and accounting system with OTRS.
While OTRS is initially being used as a ticketing and reporting solution, plans to expand use are already underway. Within the year, Emapta plans to transition to the OTRS Configuration Management Database (CMDB) for better IT asset management.
“Our IT capabilities are an important component that enables a secure and reliable data processing environment which is a critical pillar to the success of offshore teams. By investing heavily in our technology solutions, we have positioned ourselves to respond quickly without compromising security,” said Henry.
About Emapta’s IT Service Delivery
Henry Vassall Jones is the Chief Technology Officer at Emapta, an Australian-owned and managed knowledge-based staffing platform operating across the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Vietnam. Henry leads a team of 100+ IT professionals to provide enterprise-grade data security, infrastructure, and support systems through OTRS for our clients’ teams in the Philippines.