Client
The Client is a leading Healthcare Retailer with over 1000 stores in the UK and Irish Republic.

Project
The client had decided to bring accountability for Service Delivery back in house from their outsource provider, who had managed it for the previous four years. This included the management of the Help Desk, which was seen as a key part of delivering an effective end to end service to the internal IT customers.

Service from the Help Desk had been reducing with increases in the time taken to answer calls and a decrease in the number of issues ‘fixed at desk’. Calls volumes were then increasing from Customer chases and complaints leading to low morale levels and high attrition rate amongst the Help Desk Analysts. This in turn was leading to a failure to meet the service level agreements in place and dissatisfaction from the end user community, particularly from the customer facing operatives in the retail stores.

With mid-August set as the date for the management of the service to return in house, including a number of Help Desk staff, it was important to stabilise the service, work on improving staff morale and prepare for the key Christmas trading period.

Approach
Xantus installed a Service Delivery Manager with hands-on experience not only of managing Help Desks but of managing Service Delivery in its fullest sense, encompassing the complete ITIL based service delivery process set.

The initial challenge was to stabilise the service by working with the Management Team to implement quick wins, whilst working on the longer term initiatives to improve productivity, performance and staff morale.

Quick wins included the stopping the logging of wrong number calls. Some 3000 calls a month were being taken that should have been routed to other business areas.

Once agreed with the Client’s Management Team, the organisation structure was re-aligned to enable clearly defined accountabilities and performance targets for the managers and analysts alike. The first line team which previously took all the initial calls was split into sub-teams focused on specific business or technology areas, and control spread over several managers who were not encouraged to work together. This led to a fractured service with some teams overworked and other under utilised. This was changed with one manager made responsible for the complete first line service. A training programme was implemented to increase analyst expertise so that a greater variety of calls could be dealt with by a larger number of staff. This allowed increased flexibility in the allocation of analysts to teams, it also increased analyst job satisfaction and overall morale.

A programme of moving incident resolution closer to the customer was implemented, so that fixes that had previously been carried out by back office ‘Resolver Teams’ were transferred to Help Desk analysts.

For the longer term, proposals were developed to introduce a career structure to allow analysts to progress within the Help Desk and also to allow for role and salary progression.

Benefits
All key performance measures improved significantly over the five month engagement so that by the key Christmas trading period all key measures were “green”. For example, average speed of answer was improved from 30 seconds to less than 14 seconds in the key high volume Christmas trading period, staff attrition rate reduced from over 40% to less than 10% and significantly, the availability of tills in the retail stores improved from 97.5% to 98.8%.

Feedback
The Client commented, “We have benefited from the experience that Xantus offered us in this transition. With their knowledge and our joint plans in place we delivered what is seen as the best Christmas from an I.T Service perspective for many years.”

“We also benefited from working closely with Xantus, to the point that they were seen as an extension to the internal team; working to the same goals and objectives.”

More Information
For more information please contact Catherine Sanders at Xantus on 0161 495 2330 or email catherine.sanders@xantus.co.uk