ITIL Best Practice

In early 2008 Extrasys started looking at ways to change how we work by utilising ITIL’s principals of best practice. Because Extrasys is driven both by technology and the needs of our customers we are in a state of constant evolution. Best practice from ITIL is both current and practical, combining the latest thinking with sound, common sense guidance.

I myself took the ITIL course in March and was greatly relieved that we were already chiefly following ITIL’s principals. However, there is always room for improvement and I was eager to start implementing the principals I learned particularly in our Service Desk. Our Service Desk is our main contact with our clients and I wanted to begin there so our clients would experience the benefits of ITIL first.

One of the initial things we did was a simple name change of our Help Desk to a Service Desk. This is much more reflective of our frequent correspondence with our clients as the majority of our day is not solving incidents, but relates to account management, requests, general or sales queries and providing our users with good quality customer service and status updates.

After that we needed to review our current processes. By going through each process within our Service Desk and comparing it with ITIL’s practices I was able to see some gaps that needed to be filled to eliminate redundant work, decrease rework, reducing costs and improve our reliability and project delivery times.

Next we needed to solidify and document roles and responsibilities of each member of staff. By defining roles we then started to overlap the responsibilities of our team by sharing our knowledge and integrating our team further. This in turn improved our productivity and resources as we were able to better utilise our skills and experience. All of these little changes saw a positive impact on customer satisfaction through a more professional approach to service delivery. We then started to integrate ITIL with the sales and business demands improving communication flows between our technical and sales teams. ITIL’s principals have improved our business, customer and user requirements making us more a competitive IT service provider.

The New Voices of Extrasys

Last week I was at our Leeds office in order to train the Call Management Team based there on Extrasys calls, logging tickets and some basic 1^st line support resolutions.

The reasoning behind this was to not only integrate the Extrasys business unit further with Bailey Teswaine, and eventually other NG Bailey companies, but also to utilise the existing resources better within our own business. This transition will allow for faster response times to our tickets as our technicians will be able to concentrate fully on the issue rather than answering and logging calls.

As of the end of this week, Extrasys clients new first-point of telephone contact will be the lovely ladies of Ann, Donna and Karen at our Call Management Centre.

Since all three ladies have been working in the Call Management Centre for quite some time, they are already familiar with the tasks of professionally answering, logging and escalating calls to technicians for Bailey Teswaine and s2s and are familiar with ITIL’s best practice methods. This not only made the training easy, however, I also learned from their experiences and was happy to integrate their approaches of call management into our Extrasys Service Desk.

As with everything, there will be a learning curve as the Call Management Team become more familiar with the types of questions to ask and become comfortable using our RT ticketing system. However, I have every confidence that we will be able to maintain our high levels of customer service and set an industry standard first line fix rate.

Personally, I will miss conferring with our clients on a regular basis as I have developed good relations with them, nevertheless I will as always be available for direct customer service issues or tickets requiring more technical support. Anne, Donna and Karen each have their own engaging qualities which will make this transition smooth and I have every assurance that they will soon build their own relationships with our clients.