JSE-listed SecureData, an information security and risk management products provider with customers in South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean islands, has used DVT's Radical solution to revolutionise its standard helpdesk offering to the level of service desk, in the process elevating its customer service to new heights.
Radical is a highly flexible customer relationship management (CRM) solution that provides a stable, customisable platform and framework for a range of business requirements, including operations workflows and helpdesk systems. DVT is a company in the JSE AltX-listed DTH group.
SecureData's customer offering spans multi-centric solutions focused on providing and protecting information infrastructure and data. The customer helpdesk facility has long formed an integral part of SecureData's service offerings to its clients.
In 2007, in an effort to enhance its offering, the company planned to evolve its helpdesk into a full service desk that could be outsourced to clients. This involved extending the helpdesk facility beyond the basic procedure of logging calls for customers, to an enhanced service in which customers' calls can be transferred directly to technical experts for immediate assistance.
A range of CRM solutions were vetted before the decision was made to run with Radical.
“Although we had been running our helpdesk on Radical for some years, the migration to a full service desk required a lot more functionality than that required by a standard helpdesk software,” says Hendrick Fourie, support manager at SecureData.
“Radical is not unique in its ability to manage customer queries via phone, e-mail or the Web through a single system. But it was the software's customisable architecture that clinched our decision to choose it as our system above all others.”
Customising Radical to a service desk offering required an extension of the standard Response Service Level Agreement (SLA), Repair SLA, Automated Group allocation and Workflow/Governance processing for customer-related support issues, to include broader service-related functionality.
This included the addition of information fields for the capture and updating of details relating to all logged calls to enable consistency in feedback between technical experts and customers.
Radical is designed to gather customer data in a typical tree-type format to represent the company's structure, and enables the ability to drill down to site level and further if required.
“Another important customisation was the system's ability to automatically calculate the number of hours and callouts logged against our SLA customers. This enhancement has knocked hours off our team's work processes,” says Fourie.
A customisable graphical display in Radical, the Dashboard, provides the ability to see live information specific to the business, such as the number and type of calls per customer, and to drill down to more detailed information such as call description and problem resolution.
Other essential features that Radical brings to SecureData's service desk offering include the ability to see how many open or unassigned calls there are, and how many have been allocated to which technicians. This information updates in real-time and, says Fourie, makes managing the service desk a lot easier, while motivating the team to strive for continuous improvement.
“Every service desk works on different SLAs and requires its own individual response times. Radical's flexible design helped us keep each customer unique, with their own response times and service level requirements,” says Fourie.
The solution also provides a Web interface for SecureData's customers using the service desk facility.
“SecureData also provides an outsourced service desk facility for customers who lack the infrastructure for a support desk. Radical allows them to have a Web interface so they can see their specific portion of their calls and run reports using the information, without being able to see other customers' information,” says Fourie.
The latest enhancement to Radical is a feature that keeps track of the financial goals in each department or business unit, displaying a live summary for the fiscal year as well as each quarter.
DVT business unit manager Stephen Groenewald says Radical's greatest strength is its ability to adapt to changing business needs.
“All business needs are easily customised in the powerful Radical Package Editor rather than add-ons, specifically designed to suit the client's unique needs. Designed by DVT as a rapid application development framework as well as vertical end-to-end products, the solution is flexible and adaptable. This makes it ideal for helpdesks, service desks, loyalty, CRM and workflow management of any business operation,” says Groenewald.
Share