Infrastructure Outsourcing: CSC Revitalises the Help Desk improving the customer satisfaction by 30%

The client is one of the largest corporations in the United States. CSC has worked as a strategic partner with the client and its subsidiaries since 1999, when the client outsourced its IT operations to CSC in a 10-year outsourcing agreement valued at over $2 billion.

The Challenge: A Consolidated Help Desk to Support the Client’s Global Reach

At the start of the outsourcing partnership, the client faced several problems with its help desk operations. There are several different help desks throughout the organization, each with its own tools for tracking customer problems.

The CSC Solution: A Centralised Help Desk

CSC rolled out a series of help desk best practices that have resulted in a transformation and revitalisation of the client help desk, among them:

• Consolidating all the help desks into a single, centralised help desk that responds quickly to customer problems 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• Highly trained, permanent staff members to work at the help desk, with ongoing training to improve their skill levels and equipment knowledge.
• Implementation of CSC’s Remote Management Option, which allows a technician in one part of the country to perform diagnostics and solutions on customer computers located in another part of the country — or even another side of the planet. This remote problem resolution capability enables highly skilled help desk personnel to be used across the client's global divisions.
• Standardising servers, PCs, laptops and other devices throughout the organisation, allowing help desk personnel to master the intricacies of a smaller number of tools. In turn, this simplification of hardware enables problems to be resolved faster.
• Standardizing the thousands of different software configurations across the client organization into three categories — Tier 1, including operating and browser software; Tier 2, including Microsoft Outlook, Adobe, and Outlook; and Tier 3, including business-unit specific software. This simplification of software allows help desk staff to concentrate on a smaller number of software tools, thereby enhancing their ability to provide immediate resolutions to customer problems.

The Benefits to the Client

CSC’s streamlined, revitalised help desk has provided enormous benefits to the client:

• Single, centralised, 24x7 help desk
• Remote problem resolution
• Highly-trained technicians
• Dramatic improvement in customer satisfaction, from levels as low as 50 per cent when CSC took over the help desk, to levels averaging 80 percent since CSC implemented a centralized help desk
• Significant increase in number of problems resolved during the first call, which is now at 85 percent.