This blog is about how to provide IT support as a managed service and at what levels an organization can provide the effective Customer service / support to help the clients and their end users.
In today’s world, customer service is playing an important role irrespective of the Industry. Whether it is a Restaurant, a boutique or technology space like IT or Research, companies are looking for organizations / teams who can provide an effective support system to them and to their customers. Support has also become one of the important parameters in their evaluation while selecting their vendor.
Even IT firms are giving a lot of emphasize on the Support model. Organizations are thinking and providing the support function and its importance while they are in the early stages of proposals.
Whom to Support and at what levels:
When an IT team takes up the responsibility to support, they need to be prepared to provide end to end service. This includes catering to all kinds of support requests that comes from different sources like vendors, channel partners, service providers, third party, clients, Clients’ customers as well as End users.
Also, there is no single mode of communication you can stick to while you are agreeing to provide the support to your customers’. Support may be through e-mails, chats, online support, Voice OR through ticketing systems. However in IT arena, the support is mainly provided through ‘Ticketing System’.
At Faichi Solutions, we being an “IT as a service” provider, support our direct clients, their customers as well as the end user if needed. We segregate this support into 3 Levels:
L1: End User Support – Client’s Customers’ Support – Help Desk (24X7)
L2: Middle Level Support / Internal Customer support – Assessment Team
L3: Engineering Support – Engineering Team
Above categories are not only important for their types but in the order in which they are noted.
In order to provide a holistic Support solution to the client, it’s crucial that all these levels go hand in hand. We can use the current trend of Agile Methodology for managing the support work using Kanban.
If there is no cohesiveness between these support teams, it might lead to a major friction & result in business loss. If one support team is not aware that how the other support team is operating and what exactly to pass on to the other team, such broken link can lead to:
- Team failures in achieving the customer satisfaction as there may be costs incurred unnecessarily and charged to client.
- Client may go into losses as the costs incurred are not charged to their customers.
For example, if an End User logs a complaint that on an eLearning site an article is not accessible by free user on our client websites. In this case there are following possibilities:
- Particular free user is having problem in login to the site
- This feature is not meant to be accessed by free user, as per client requirement before and may be an enhancement
- This may be a bug and needs to be fixed.
To address this issue, if we do not have different levels of support and they do not work in tandem, following problems may occur:
- It is a paid article & not free feature: If engineering team picks up the case directly and makes the article free that may be a revenue loss of our client as that might be a paid article.
- It is an enhancement and not an issue: If engineering team directly addresses the issue without assessment team, there may be revenue loss to client as that will slip through the crack and will not be billed for customer.
- If the Assessment team directly commits the timeline and efforts to client without interacting with engineering team, then that can lead to faulty service & customer dissatisfaction as it might take more time.
Hence, a close co-ordination between these teams is very critical for any customer support infrastructure.
This article is written by Anjaneyulu Pulagalla, Project Manager at Faichi, managing our support team. Faichi Solutions has a strong portfolio of technology application support services aligned to fully support our clients. Our current support landscape includes L1, L2 and L3 support in various technologies. Our application support service team goes beyond the traditional support model and transforms the existing support process to be more efficient. To know more about our Support services, click here