December 02, 2010

By Susan J. Campbell

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

In a help desk situation, an organization not only needs competent and skilled agents to handle call volumes, it also needs robust solutions to streamline the help desk process so efficiency is promoted and customers receive the right support. 

Purple Heart Services (News - Alert) was facing a challenge within its call center and needed help from RightAnswers. Purple Heart supports an innovative home-based, disabled veteran job training program designed to eliminate the cost points of the standard brick and mortar call center and help desk providers. At the same time, the organization is able to put national heroes back to work. 

Purple Heart adapts quickly to modern-day challenges faced by combat wounded and disabled veterans. The challenge for Purple Heart Services was the various knowledge management solutions implemented in the past to assist in help desk processes lacked the pre-populated content in the knowledge base. The organization wanted to improve the efficiency of its support analysts and required a solution that would provide pre-packaged content and allow for the organization to enter its own pieces of knowledge as needed.

The solution also had to integrate easily with Purple Heart’s FootPrints help desk application. With this integration, Purple Heart support analysts would gain the capability to search the knowledge base whenever an incident management process occurred. As a result, answers could be streamlined and the help desk would become more efficient. To meet this challenge, Purple Heart selected the RightAnswers (News - Alert) OnDemand solution. A highly recommended option, the OnDemand solution was up and running by July of 2009. Jonathan Frazier, senior systems administrator and IT manager at Purple Heart Services referred to the implementation and user setup as quick and easy.

“Content aside, the biggest challenge we faced was how we would fully integrate RightAnswers into our current systems and processes,” explained Frazier. “Once we were up-and-running, the products’ ease-of-use and flexibility spoke for itself. We have used other knowledge management solutions in the past, but RightAnswers is much more comprehensive – especially in terms of the knowledge they provided. The content and knowledge is really what made RightAnswers our top choice.”

Within the OnDemand solution is the RightAnswers Unified Knowledge Suite and Support Analyst, both delivered as Software-as-a-Service solutions. With this business model, Purple Heart could enjoy the benefits without the complexity of an enterprise solution. This allowed the organization to get up and running quickly.

The implementation of the RightAnswers OnDemand solution delivered key benefits to Purple Heart Services, including knowledge centralization, enhanced content, improved first contact resolution and a better close ratio that helped to create better customer satisfaction.

“The RightAnswers OnDemand product has really provided us with a flexible model that is highly scalable and was easily implemented,” said Frazier. “Our main purpose in deploying the solution was to increase the efficiency of our help desk – and it has really worked out well for us. The solution has provided our support analysts with a method to collaborate and access standard industry solutions to reduce call handling time, increase first call resolution and create a more efficient support team.”

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Juliana Kenny