It Was Only A Matter Of Time

We off shored our help(less) desk and our L1,L2, and L3 support. It was not announced to our customer in advance that we were off shoring the support, but it was pretty clear to them when it came time to get help. Our customers call up, request support that the desk cannot offer, and a ticket is routed to Asia to be 'resolved'. Our customer then gets an e-mail from the night shift in Asia (!!) asking questions in an attempt to resolve the issue. The trading of e-mails goes on for a few days and then usually one of two things happens: Either the ticket is put into the L4 queue (here in the US/Canada/Brazil) or it gets put into the R&D support queue. Teh closure rate by the Asian teams is not very high.

Before the off shoring, our customer asked to have an addendum made to their contract that would allow for dedicated R&D support for their site (DRaDS). Initially this was just to support the specifics of R&D engineers...a unique bunch. They had to pay extra for this because we had to make sure people were on site to help during business hours. An agreement was reached, but with caveats. The enginerds wanted a call back within 1 hour informing them that the ticket had been assigned to a person, not a queue. In return they agreed to dismiss the service level agreement on the RDaDS calls and make all their requests via phone, not the web system. We asked for this last part because it would be impossible to guarantee a call back within one hour for something that went over the public inernet. They agreed.

Now after a few months of off shoring, the R&D queue is getting a little busy. It appears that people are not satisfied with the support they get in Asia and are putting in DRaDS tickets. This trend is bothersome for a couple of reasons. One, the customer is not calling the help(less) desk to put these in..the tickets are being submitted via the web. This means no call to the customer. Two, the increase in R&D tickets means that the customer is paying more money for support without an SLA (Service Level Agreement). Three, the local techs are working very hard to keep up, but mgmt is not getting any extra help for them.

Another thing that makes me laugh is the fact that we went to centralized support to save our customers money. 1 desk to call, remote help, reasonable expectation. Now we have in some ways reverted back to the way we ran IT 5-10 years ago only there is no service level in place...and our customer is paying more for this?

Oh, by the way, we have a dedicated R&D Help Desk (actually two - Europe and Asia) that handles the "simple" issues like Unix and Windows permissions, PW resets, and the like worldwide. They also get some of the DRaDS calls, but instead of assigning them to the tech, they assign them to a queue so I can assign them. Yep, saving lots of money there...