Thought Leadership, Service Desk
Engineers use a unique mode of thinking – commonly called the “engineering mindset” – that emphasizes visualizing everything as a system and being infinitely curious about understanding problems and discovering solutions. The focus is on identifying which components are working and which are not, and applying this knowledge to define a solution.
IT support teams, including help desk, desktop support, server administrators, and others, face a host of problems as they work through interrupt-driven support requests. That’s because the traditional tiered support model, in which tickets migrate from L1 to L2 to L3 as they seek resolution, requires escalation of approximately 60 percent of tickets to find a solution. That escalation of support tickets introduces inefficiency in time-to-close and drags down the quality of the customer support experience. In fact, escalations can increase inefficiency by 20 percent in terms of the time they take to resolve.
One Astreya customer, a Fortune 500 company, was struggling with the inefficiency caused by traditional tiered support systems as they experienced significant growth, month over month, in the number of supported users. The company was finding it difficult to keep up with the increased demand for support. The team at Astreya helped the company resolve this issue by having their strategic managed service provider recruit, train, and cultivate an engineering mindset in their outsourced global Help Desk team.
Building and curating an engineering mindset into Help Desk services is foundational to high-quality user support.
Understanding Engineering Mindset
Often with Help Desk tickets, the root cause of the problem isn’t apparent. The result is that support offers scripted solutions that don’t solve the user’s problem. This leaves the user to return to Help Desk again and again, escalating up through the tiers until a solution is found. When Help Desk technicians work with an engineering mindset, they are committed to fully identifying and understanding the user’s problem before prescribing a solution. That means asking users the right questions, having a complete picture of the IT structure, and identifying alternative solutions if the user doesn’t see problem resolution.
Reducing the IT Slowdown
With the engineering mindset in place for their service desk, the Fortune 500 company mentioned above was able to increase efficiency to keep up with the increased user demand that came with their workforce growth. Since implementing the engineering mindset, ticket resolution rates within the Help Desk consistently exceeded 70 percent, meaning the vast majority of resolutions occurred at the Help Desk without escalations to the in-house IT service teams.
Customer satisfaction with Help Desk services also increased: Employees’ sentiment regularly exceeded 96 percent of users rating their IT support experience as “Awesome.” Perhaps most importantly, the company was able to maintain these measures of performance even as they saw significant growth in both volume and scope of services supported by the global Help Desk; with Astreya’s support, the company’s Help Desk serves more than 45,000 employees worldwide, in addition to 10,000 to 15,000.
Adopting the engineering mindset with Astreya
At Astreya, adopting the engineering mindset in a user-supported setting technicians are trained to deconstruct a ticket until they deeply understand the incident or request. This allows them to identify the optimal resolution.
With our Managed Service Desk’s dedication to the engineering mindset, we significantly reduce the number of tickets that are escalated through the tiered system to find a solution. In fact, in 70 percent of help-desk situations put before Astreya’s Managed Service desk, the technician who deals with the customer first is the one who solves the customer’s problem. This is possible because our technicians are trained to use advanced techniques, such as Fault Domain Isolation and Root Cause Analysis, to ensure they deeply understand a customer’s issue or request so they can define the best possible solution as quickly as possible – in that order. Astreya also recruits, trains, and reinforces the engineering mindset with our onboarding and operational processes, integrating the curation of the engineering mindset into our quality controls.
If your company requires scalable high-quality user support that can achieve more than 70 percent resolution with a reduction in CPSU quarter over quarter, Astreya can help. Our Managed Service Desk acts as an extension of your organization, designed to deliver quality customer experiences that go beyond CSAT surveys.