Growing your business with Radiant System: 7 stages of IT support

How does ((OTRS)) Community Edition based Service Desk help to grow your business? Let’s trace the development of an average IT team in a jewelry retail company to find out.

Stage 1. First steps to automatization

20–30 stores

Let’s look at a jewelry retailer with about 30 operating stores. Business is picking up steam and starting to actively grow. The company opens a new store every week.

Meanwhile the IT department in the back office has just 2 employees. They provide all maintenance services for the company, including ERP system, corporate email, and cash register support. Everytime something doesn’t work properly they get an email about it.

But the IT department has hundreds of emails in their inboxes. Urgent requests disappear in the mass of emails, some are left on read without an answer. Only a small part of support requests gets taken care of in time. The support guys can only tell their boss they’re swamped with the amount of requests they recieve, but they don’t have any new ideas how to improve the department’s productivity.

Stage 2. The rapid growth time

50 stores

New stores can’t open on schedule due to tech issues. Broken cash registers cause entire stores to stop working. Idle time means huge losses for the company.

It’s obvious that there is a massive shortage of IT specialists. The company hires new people who help clear the backlog and systemize the process.

The first step is implementing one support inbox for all email requests instead of using separate personal inboxes. It helps to keep track of all support requests. Complete requests are marked with a ‘Done’ flag. This solution helps to keep the workflow organized, but it still requires manual tracking.

Stage 3. The Day the Service Desk came

The need to automate processes for the IT department is imminent. IT team lead chooses one of the most popular solutions in IT community: free open source Service Desk. Spoiler: it was great!

After a successful trial run the IT department chooses to implement an open source solution for the service desk, ((OTRS)) Community Edition. It allows the team to admin requests, update their status, track deadlines, and assign tasks.

All emails from the support inbox go to the Service Desk, where they are tracked as tasks. No email or request is ever lost and tracking is much quicker and easier.

So, Service Desk became the first custom solution for the retailer. The IT department fully customized the portal’s structure and features to meet other departments’ or stores’ needs.

Stage 4. Prioritization: no one gets left behind

100 stores

As the number of requests to the IT team rapidly increases, it needs to prioritize some tasks before others. Look at this example: one request is from a flagship store in the city center where the cash register is broken, another from the accountant having trouble with a printer. Which one should become a priority for the IT team?

IT team uses ITSM-approaches to create an SLA and prioritize tasks in Service Desk based on their urgency and scale. So, for our example business analysts calculated the overhead costs for both problems. Of course, a broken cash register created bigger losses and needed to be fixed urgently, while the printer could stay broken for a couple of days before the team would fix it. Those approaches are confirmed with the team leads and entered into the system as priority regulations for future issues of this sort.

Now the IT team can rush to the flagship store to save the day, while the accountant will have to use the printer next door for a few days. Nobody asked her about what the priority should be…

Service Desk easily solves the problem of prioritizing. The requests are automatically filtered to have the urgent ones at the top of the list for each employee. The systems does that by going through a list of questions for each request:

• Is the issue urgent?
• Who is responsible for the solution?
• What is the deadline?
• Has the issue come up before?
• What is the solution?

The next step is creating a full powered self-service portal. By using flexible settings the team can ‘teach’ Service Desk to prioritize tasks at the get-go. An employee reporting an issue simply has to select a category from a drop-down list. Each category has an assigned priority in the system.

Stage 5. IT department systemization

120–130 stores

If no support requests get lost in mail and every issue is solved in time, it’s time to systemize the team’s workflow. The next stage of developing Service Desk is efficiently assigning tasks between the team members. Each task has an assigned specialist and a deadline.

Smart service processes allow the IT department to spend significantly less time on routine tasks. Instead the team can focus on current issues and monitor operational continuity of workstations and cash registers. For each issue the team has a clear understanding of additional costs it’s causing the company and ways to lower them.

And now the flagship store in the city center is secure from idle time. Every high profit store is closely monitored by the IT team and has many backups to prevent any issues.

Stage 6. Business units: services for other departments

This success of automating IT department’s processes inspired the company to use it in other departments. HR, accounting, legal team, maintenance department all can benefit greatly from an easy-to-use system of task management.

Each employee can find necessary services and can check the status of their requests. For example, an office clerk can send a vacation or documentation request. A salesman from one of the stores can make a request for a cash register maintenance or a display case. There are more than a hundred people in the office, but it’s still not a problem to prepare for a new employee’s first day or opening a new store abroad.

You don’t need to walk across the office to check on your task with a colleague. You both can see the task and its status in the system.

That is how a service portal came to life. It is a consistent support software where each business department provides services to others. The software the company uses for more effective management is Radiant Customer Portal for ((OTRS)) Community Edition.

Stage 7. The best automatization practices for customer support

Service Desk showed impressive results inside the company. It was quite easy to implement the solution for a customer support service.

A customer now can report a problem right on the website. That message goes to Service Desk like any reported issue inside of the company, but the person assigned to the task works in the Customer service, not in IT. Service Desk helps monitor buyers’ feedback and increase customer loyalty.

Radiant System was lucky to become a partner of the IT team in the jewelry retail company. We went through all of these stages side by side and learned a lot from each other in the process.

This partnership inspired us to create radically new customer platform Radiant Service Desk for ((OTRS)) Community Edition using our knowledge of the retail market and small and medium-sized businesses.

More client stories are coming soon here. Follow us and stay updated!