The concerns related to the inherent limitations of the traditional helpdesk model, within which only a small percentage of issues were resolved on the first call due to the limited knowledge of the outsourced personnel answering the phone, and the need to escalate issues to internal resources.
By bringing the service function back in-house, Unum believed it could staff its service center with personnel who could provide a much higher rate of first call resolution both through accumulating personal experience and the development of a knowledge base that documented common issues and the measures needed to resolve them.
First call resolution not only inspires greater confidence in the IT organization but also reduces service costs in two ways: first, it improves the productivity of the employees placing the call by getting them back to work faster; and it also avoids having to engage higher-compensated engineers to resolve technical issues.
Unum has begun to build its service desk knowledge base using IBM's TSRM which the insurer installed in Sept. 2009. As is typical within the outsourced help desk model, Unum used a tool provided by the vendor.
"The outsourced provider's tool was a 'vanilla' application that they used with all their clients"
Unumは、IBMのTSRMを使用したサービスデスク用知識ベースの構築を始め、2009年の9月には保険会社が導入をしました。外注のヘルプデスクでは標準ですが、Unumはメーカーから提供を受けたツールを使用しています。
「外注提供社のツールはvanillaアプリケーションで、すべてのクライアントのもとで使用しています。」
"When you wanted to look at issues unique to our company it was sometimes difficult to get the view of requested data, so we decided to move to a tool that we owned and that ran on our infrastructure so that we could get access to the necessary data on demand."
While the decision to install IBM TSRM for internal knowledge management capabilities was made before re-evaluating the outsourced help desk arrangement, installation of the tool proved fortuitous, Corbin acknowledges. "When we decided to bring service desk in-house, it uncomplicated the transition significantly because we didn't need to execute a transition of tool and data: that was already in place," he says.
In Oct. 2010, Unum decided to bring the service desk internally on the basis of three considerations. First, he relates, Unum reviewed performance statistics and concluded its IT organization could do better. "The second aspect was that we were implementing the IT Service Management Framework and realized this was an important aspect in terms of how IT was received by the broader organization," he says. "The third consideration was that our agreement with the vendor was up for renewal."
The transition was not a hard sell based on projected benefits and savings calculated. "Years ago when there was a movement towards outsourcing service desk, the argument was that it was a commodity that could be provided more economically on an outsourced basis. We discovered that we could bring it in-house on a cost-neutral basis, and that enabled us to invest in the knowledge management capabilities without extra investment."
While the software for managing service knowledge is already in place, populating the IBM TSRM database is an ongoing task, according to Crisp. "It's something that has to be built over time, and we have started the process."
Unum also brought new staff on board on by the end of February and trained them to be ready for the April 1 transition. "We were ramping up between hiring and the point at which we would be taking 100 percent of the calls, and the vendor was quite cooperative in helping us to manage that transition," Crisp comments. "Having service desk in the new model allows us to continually increase the level of service we provide because we can very tightly integrate training on more and more capabilities because we have more control over the process."
