Each client solution is uniquely designed to serve our clients. This is the “art”–the customized process, informed by our homework and research, created by Netfor and “staged” across your organization’s infrastructure. The way the pieces work together is can be practically theater–only our SDIPs take out the drama created by your past pain points.

The Science of Solution Architecture

As for the science–that’s embedded in the Solution Architecture itself. Each process utilized in the project includes strategic goals, activities, policies, working procedures, and responsibilities. Most importantly, each process has its own critical success factors (CSF) made up of key performance indicators (KPI)–crucial data that forms the foundation of the complete Solution Architecture. Among many others, some examples of highly important CSFs include:

• Resolving customer issues during the first call,
• Maintaining customer or user productivity,
• Providing a positive call experience

Measuring and Reporting Your Performance

How do we use data to inform and create better customer experiences? Netfor makes sure your CSFs are being met by constantly measuring and reporting related KPIs, each based on a metric-specific formula. All KPIs are assigned a target success level, as well as a warning and a high risk level. This tiered system allows our clients to immediately understand, on a day-to-day basis, which goals are being met, and which need corrective action. Some example SDIP KPIs and target levels include the following:

• Time service factor (80% of calls answered within a certain amount of time)
• Abandon rate (less than 5%)
• First call resolution (greater than 75%)

Giving You The Tools You Need To Succeed

Because no support system is complete without the technology and tools to deliver exceptional service, Netfor’s support technology is baked into our Solution Architecture. This includes the following essential tools:

• Ticketing system to track all data
• Business intelligence tool for reporting
• Phone system to manage calls
• Screen-sharing tools
• Knowledge management tools

Our Solution Architecture wraps up with a organizational roll-out plan–effectively communicating your custom solution is key to hitting targeted KPIs, as well as effectively implementing a complete Service Desk solution. Without organization-wide agreement and a planned roll-out, your employees can become actors not only without scripts, but without even a plot line to follow. Netfor does the homework so that when your Service Desk hits the stage, you’ll be focused on achieving a standing ovation.

Stay tuned as we cover SDIP Implementation and Closure in our next post.

Catch up with Netfor’s SDIP series:

• 4 Steps Toward Discovering Your Organization’s Customer Experience Potential
• How Mature Is Your Service Desk?

Planning is also more than just process–planning is people, too. Netfor ensures that each individual assigned to any project knows their role and responsibilities required to make the project a success. Creating strong teams is an essential part of the project infrastructure–after all, you’re only as strong as your weakest link.

Our plans revolve around three key factors:

Maturity

A balanced implementation plan is key to a successful Service Desk Improvement Project (SDIP). Through workshops, interviews, and analyses of current practices, Netfor determines the maturity level by measuring it against our planned vision for the best practices in each area: organization, governance, processes, and technology.

An example of uneven, unbalanced organizational maturity–potential cause of project bottlenecks across an SDIP.

The current maturity of a Service Desk determines what recommendations are necessary: this can range anywhere from a handful, to 30, 40, or more. It’s crucial to balance the maturity levels across a project in order to create harmony in your improvements–focusing too hard in just a single area can result in an imbalance that creates bottlenecks in core capabilities across the project .

Quick Wins

An integral part of any SDIP, quick wins typically make up 10-20% of the project recommendations. Since they often last just a month or two, and are low-cost, low-barrier, low-effort, and high-value, quick wins provide an immediate benefit and a boost in momentum at the outset of the project. They’re also managed as individual projects, allowing employees to really own a piece of the initial success, feeling a clear sense of accomplishment when they’re completed.

Long Term Projects

The remainder of the planning is dedicated toward long-term projects. These are managed in a more formal Project Management fashion in order to minimize the risk of incompletion. These projects are divided into four distinct phases:

• Prepare to Manage the Service Desk
• Prepare to Measure the Service Desk
• Prepare to Service and Go Live
• Steady State and Beyond

These phases encompass the entirety of the project–they’re tactical-but-high-level efforts that can be seen, touched, and felt by members of the organization as your Service Desk becomes more mature.

Once all the key activities and tasks are established, the labor and costs determined, and roles assigned, the SDIP moves into Stage Three: Solution Architecture, where each major process area is designed and readied for implementation.

Keep up with the Service Desk Improvement project series–last time on the Netfor blog, we discussed our Discovery and Recommendations process in implementing a recent SDIP.

It’s easy to identify pain points when they’re visual. Take your home–if a thunderstorm rolls through, produces hail, and breaks a window, the problem (a broken window) is easy to visualize, and the solution (replacing the glass) is equally easy to determine. But customer service is a much more complex creature, with constantly moving parts, and multiple parties interacting. You may not be sure what the problem is; but you know something inherent in the service is not working out, whether it is for your employees, your customers, or both.

Because serving your clients is one of the most integral pieces of any business–we’ll be talking about Netfor Service Desk Improvement Projects, detailing the specific ways we envisioned, invested in, and implemented a recent Service Desk Improvement Project

Stage 1 – Discovery & Recommendations

During Stage 1, Netfor lays the groundwork for the partnership:

Goals

In this situation, our client needed to make their service desk “customer-centric.” Along with achieving a high level of first call resolution, and providing a great customer experience, this meant creating an overall unique vision for our client that aligned with industry best practices.

Challenges

Netfor discovered early that our client’s Help Desk was being run by IT employees who also wore other hats in the organization. Providing a great customer experience means having a workforce management plan that allows for that great experience; and our client’s employees filling multiple roles resulted in a confusing, unclear service delivery model.

Our client also hadn’t implemented best practices for resolving customer’s issues. Known requests and problems weren’t clearly documented for easy reference, and unknown or new issues weren’t being tracked either. All of this contributed to an overall sense of inefficiency resulting from lack of performance data–and a frustrated consumer.

Assessment

Netfor assessed our client’s four critical areas: governance, organization, processes, and technology. In order to measure results down the line, knowing the state of each area is imperative to success. In this Service Desk project, governance was the key area for improvement. Employees weren’t using best practices; and they needed governance as well as internal sponsorship to create a work environment necessary for great customer service.

Recommendations

In the last Discovery and Recommendations step, Netfor immediately recommended solutions for both quick wins, and long-term success. In the short-term, Netfor planned to complete a client scorecard to show all the important metrics for Service Desk success–items like this are actionable and create forward momentum. An Incident Resolution Model for our client’s most critical call type–in this case, an in-store Internet connectivity issue–was also recommended.

Long-term, Netfor’s recommendations focused on preparing our client to manage their customer experience internally. This entailed training the management on service desk Standard Operating Procedures, and a departmental reorganization that would support a service-oriented customer experience.

After the recommendations gained “Go-Forward” approval, this project immediately moved into Stage 2: Planning. Stay tuned as we continue to shed light on our Service Desk Improvement Projects with details of Netfor’s project implementation. Are you ready to benefit from the Netfor process? Contact us today.

Service desks are no different–what once was multiple points of contact, now can be streamlined to a data-driven service focused on resolving problems instead of moving them down the line. Originally, we thought to ourselves, “Let’s explain the many ways you can utilize a service desk!” But, as the list grew and grew it became clear that the real question was, “Where can’t you use a service desk?”

As part of a series on ways your organization can benefit from the strategic improvements of Netfor’s service desk, here are some Shared Services we provide to support the back-end of your business:

• IT Service Desk (previously known as Help Desk)

No matter the industry, technology is omnipresent,  a key enabler to almost all business processes. Support your devices, hardware, software, even those pesky updates, and more, with an IT Service Desk. This service is so omnipresent, expect a full blog post on how Netfor can help ensure long term customer satisfaction while reducing IT support costs.

• Facility Service Desk

Your employees need a centralized place to call for building issues. Whether it’s a broken piece of equipment, a dangerous light bulb outage, or storm damage–a central place to call and dispatch service from can be utilized, no matter how many buildings, campuses, or sites you occupy.

• Human Resources Service Desk

Questions that revolve around benefits and payroll can be some of the most important conversations that your employees have. Why keep them waiting? A central desk that can handle the changing and updating of plans, such as adding spouses, or planning for new children, can make everything run more smoothly.

• Accounts Payable / Receivable Desk

Keeping track of multiple vendors or individuals who are seeking purchase orders, requesting payments, or asking for account updates can be a time-consuming task. Our system can track invoices, pay arrangements, and more, all from our single point of contact.

• Security Desk

In any organization, safety is paramount to providing a great experience. Whether you need a security desk to handle the reporting of theft, or any other security breach; or to maintain an up-to-date badge system to control area, room, or building access–you’ll find our service desk up to the task.

Whether it’s improving facility efficiencies, making sure your employees have a quick route to solve any issue, or keeping your technology up-to-date and in-service, Netfor’s Shared Service desks can strengthen and improve your business. What change for the better can a Netfor shared service desk make in your organization? Where would the people who matter most–your employees and customers–benefit from a single point of contact?

At Netfor, we’re proud that Indiana is our home. Despite the notion some have that Indiana is “flyover country”, we’ve found that our state and community have enhanced our business in a number of ways:

Hoosier Hospitality

The origin of “Hoosier Hospitality” just like the word “Hoosier” itself is shrouded in mystery. One version notes that workers from Indiana in the 19th century, came from the working crew of a man named “Robert Hoosier.” These “Hoosiers” were hard-working, kind, and friendly folks–hospitable to everyone around.

At Netfor, our team is like Robert Hoosier’s crew. Our staff is friendly, willing to help, and always extends the time of day to solve our clients’ problems as efficiently as possible. Whether it’s something in the water, or just the result of a team effort, our hospitality in customer service is of the highest importance.

Central Location

Our location, just north of metropolitan Indianapolis in Fishers, is “Central” for both our regional and national clients. This means it’s easy for our state and regional clients to quickly drive to our facility, which is just off the Interstate. Being nearby means it’s easier to meet with our team and see our facility–we’re as easily accessible in real life as our service desks are remotely.

Nationally, Netfor’s location at the “Crossroads of America” means we’re centrally located for your air travel no matter which coast you’re travelling from. We’re a quick hop on the Interstate away from the still-new terminal of the Indianapolis International Airport, which opened in 2008.

Competitive Business Atmosphere

Home to a now-thriving innovative tech-scene and supportive business climate,
Netfor’s Indiana base of operations allows us to be very competitive in terms of cost. Infrastructure, land, utility prices, cost of living, and even phone rates are all more affordable in central Indiana–and we pass these savings on to our customers, year after year.

To do a quick numbers comparison, Indiana’s cost of living is more than ten percent below the national average. Because of this, we’re able to reduce our clients’ costs while still providing world-class services.

Those are just some of the reasons that Indiana is home for us. Sure, Indiana may be known for huge racetracks, college basketball rivalries, and acres upon acres of corn; but we think it should be world famous for being a great place to grow a business. Next time you’re on your way to work, ask the question, “What makes my home special?” You might just be surprised.

Customer Experience Management (or CEM) is essentially a strategy you must adopt that focuses on the operations and processes of your business focused around the needs of your individual customer. According to Bernd Schmitt, “the term ‘Customer Experience Management’ represents the discipline, methodology and/or process used to comprehensively manage a customer’s cross-channel exposure, interaction and transaction with a company, product, brand or service.”  There is no doubt your competition is now or will soon be focusing on the importance of the experience. The best place to start focusing this strategy is by involving the many stakeholders across the enterprise.  Building great consumer experiences will involve your company’s strategic thinkers, technology integration specialists, experts in business and service models, managers of branding, a commitment from the CEO and of course the customer.  This is the group that will be instrumental in planning for and implementing your companies Customer Experience strategy and vision.

Listening to customers’ expectations will focus the strategy and provide a never ending source of improvement ideas.  It’s the best practices your company follows to manage the implementation and ongoing control of these expectations that will differentiate you from the competition.

Lastly, let’s look at CEM systems.  Forrester research says that experience-based providers integrate both internal and external innovations to create end-to-end customer experiences. They evaluate their business models as well as business support systems and operational support systems (BSS/OSS) from the customer’s point of view to achieve the level of customer-centricity necessary to improve customer loyalty, churn and revenue (Lopez, 2007).  It essentially comes down to who listens better and follows through more completely.

Problem-Solving Mission

For this mission, we gathered up a handful of our top field technicians from around the country. With representation from Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Phoenix, New Jersey and Indiana, we had a great cross section of talent from the Netfor team. Some of the techs had been working with this same client from three, all the way up to ten years.

Our chief goal was to ensure a smooth POS upgrade process, so that ultimately, UPS can continue providing the best experience for their own customers. This means we needed to predict and solve for any potential glitches or delays. For this lab, or testing situation, we simulated an in-store environment, complete with hardware, the new software and the draft manual to be used during the roll out of this upgrade.

Creating Efficiencies

In reviewing the manual, we helped identify 590 bullet points that needed updating – everything from detecting missed steps in the instructions to clarifying wording. Some of the changes were small, but all of these tweaks add up to a better process for the client.

During our labs, our team also determined that there was a more proactive and quick way to approach the update. While the original plan had been to install software on the client’s systems in store one at a time, we realized it would be faster, but not detrimental to the process to get one system running and move on to the next POS to get it started. If there’s one thing we like to hang our hat on, it’s that we can create efficiencies and save time for our clients.

Great Interactions

As our Field Service Manager, this was a golden opportunity for me. We loved getting this in-person interaction with people we talk with on the phone all the time. Not only did this trip provide some great interaction with our client, it also ended up being a wonderful team-building experience for our techs. Ideas come together in a different way when everyone is present. Normally road warriors out in the field, our service techs were able to use the opportunity to learn from each other and gel as a group, both during the labs, and just being able to share dinner together after work.

Personally, I found the trip to be rewarding on another level too. When I served in the military, I was stationed at the naval base in San Diego. Crossing the bridge to Coronado Island, I was able to visit my old stomping grounds to round out what was otherwise a very fantastic trip.

In addition to my personal connection there, there’s a really cool boardwalk with restaurants and shops, including a neat little shop for all of your shipping needs.

In assembling my team, I was looking for people that shared both entrepreneurial spirit and a passion for this industry. Each new hire demonstrated the drive to make a business out of customer support services – that’s in the DNA of this company. As the company grew, the management staff came to share my challenge: how can we increase that DNA in our whole team?

We started looking at local school systems to understand students’ exposure to support services, and saw a great need to introduce youth to the potential in technical and other support service careers. In our early efforts to bring students in for internships, we found many individuals that were driven, with creative, problem solving and technical skills surprising for their age. These were the kids who were tinkerers, and really interested in support service oriented careers from an early age.

We were able to provide that real-life experience on basic things like what it means to be an employee, to work a full day and to show up on time. There is no better way to understand the breadth and scope of issues companies face in the Sales, Marketing or IT industry than to sit at a customer support desk. More importantly, the internship program helps the individuals answer the important question: is this what I want to do with my life? And we benefited from their enthusiasm and good work. Many of our interns have gone on to accept full-time positions with us after they graduate.

We are now pleased to be partnering with Ativio. While our ongoing internship program has focused on high-school students, they focus on connecting college students with opportunities in the industry. They saw a need for more computer science majors to gain that experience for their resumes. Ativio shares our belief that when young people get internships at Indianapolis businesses, they are more likely to graduate and get an offer or at least have some relationships in their field of interest and stay in Indiana to pursue their career.

According to NPR coverage on education, “An Indiana University report released last year found that only about 43 percent of students who graduated from a public university in 2000 remained in the state five years later.” We love doing business in Indiana, and believe in providing paths and opportunities for young people. Providing internships is just one step toward keeping talent in our state.

Do you know someone who might make a great Netfor intern? Send them to our online application here!