OCIO_SD_-_Attachment_5_-_A_Day_in_Life_of_the_OCIO_SD.doc

A Day in the Life of the OCIO Service Desk

The OCIO Service Desk Team (“SDT”) has a tough job, but someone has to do it! How the SDT handles about 1,000 user contacts a week for our approximately 3,200 users happened behind the scenes. Until now.

As tech support, we’ve had our basic problems (“I typed my password wrong 3 times and now I’m locked out.”) and connectivity issues (“My computer can’t print to the big network printer next door.”). We’ve worked on the more complicated problems for applications (“A patch was pushed out yesterday and now my Excel workbook macros won’t run.”) and mobile devices (“All on its own, my BlackBerry keeps redialing the last number I used, and the person on the other end is getting annoyed.”). Then there are the more sophisticated scheduled and unscheduled outages, system and network maintenance, and so on. The SDT realizes the challenge here is to recognize that there may be 14 different ways of handling the same issue. However, in most instances there is a best way to solve the problem for DOL, using best practices as a general guideline to resolve our users’ issues.

Tier 1

We answered the phones just over 100 times today in support of our 3, 200 users, received and responded to just under 90 e-mail requests, and entertained about 20 walk-in users. Of those 210 contacts, we created approximately 140 tickets. Usually in the morning we’ll have one or two overnight phone calls in voicemail and a few e-mails which generally create one or two tickets. Of course, these numbers are going to get higher as we add the new organizations to our support system.

Here’s how our day went phone-wise:

It’s a fairly typical day, where we have a spike of calls around the 9am timeframe and then the calls gradually taper off during the day, with a little bump in late afternoon. When we look at the times spent for each phone call, our stats show that on average about 19% of our calls take us about a minute or less from picking up the phone to hanging up the phone, while about 44% take less than 2 minutes. Overall, about 95% of our calls are completed in less than 10 minutes. The longest call we’ve ever recorded in the ACD is 40 minutes, but the average time spent on a call is just over 3 minutes.

Before last year, we were spending an average of 8 minutes per call and resolving about 80% of them at Tier 1. Over the last 18 months, however, our call volume has increased 57% while our staffing has not increased at all. (This has happened as DOL has added more applications to the environment and has asked the Tier 1 staff to accept user calls which are then passed on to the application groups. This continues the ever-growing theme in DOL of a single point of contact for user support.) This means we’re spending less time trying to resolve calls at Tier 1, but instead passing them along to other levels such as Tier 2 and Tier 3. Currently, we are averaging about 5 minutes per call, followed by a 2-minute or so wrap up time. Our first call resolution (FCR) stats are much lower than before, but we’ve become more adept at ACR – accurate call resolution – which means users are most frequently serviced by the correct support group the first time, with no back-and-forth between the groups. This helps maintain our high user survey results and keeps the user kudos flowing.

In addition to opening tickets, we’re also responsible for closing tickets that have been resolved by the different Operational Teams and our Tier 2 teammates. We are responsible for following up with every ticket to ensure that the user is satisfied with the results, that the problem is completely resolved, and that there are no other outstanding issues. This follow-up generally happens within an hour or so of receiving a resolved ticket.

Tier 2

Hanging out at the Tier 2 Service Desk, we quickly see that the support staff are sharp and quite knowledgeable, while user satisfaction metrics show a high level of satisfaction with their support. Most survey responses are glowing -- “I can’t believe I did that, and then called the Service Desk for help. They squared me straight away and my downtime was minimal. Excellent job.” – but you can also see the occasional gripe: “Sometimes the Help Desk just doesn’t get me and can’t understand my problem.” The typical (if there is such a thing) day with Tier 2 is spent troubleshooting more complicated or unique problems, visiting users to provide hands-on problem-solving (or remotely logging in to troubleshoot), performing system administration with accounts, and so on.

Satisfaction

Overall, our user satisfaction rating is great, with 98% of our customer surveys indicating they are satisfied with our service in five key areas. Here’s the breakdown:

Tier 3

Tier 3 is DOL’s Operations and Infrastructure Team. They have responsibility for keeping the infrastructure running, making sure backups are completed and verified, making sure we have enough bandwidth and enough disk space, planning for future rollouts, and so on. They help Tier 1 and Tier 2 with troubleshooting and research for the really complicated issues. Tier 1 and Tier 2 provide them with feedback when issues are brewing, when we receive similar types of calls from different regions, and so on. And vice-versa, Tier 3 keeps Tier 1 and Tier 2 in the loop when scheduled and unscheduled outages occur so that we can interact with the user community and keep them informed.

User Satisfaction� Rating� Percentage� Exceptional � 88.6� Very Satisfied� 7.4� Satisfied� 1.9� Neutral� 1.3� Dissatisfied� 0.7�