Perceptis - the new standard in customer service

UVA Reduces Operating Costs by 15% While Expanding Support

to 24/7

The University of Virginia has been ranked the No. 2 best public university in U.S. News and World Report rankings. UVA is comprised of 13 schools, almost 21,000 students and over 12,000 faculty and staff.

 

 

 

 

Client Challenge

The University of Virginia, a top public university in the country, is faced with declining budgets and increased enrollment. UVA had several siloed help desks within the centralized Technology division that they were supporting internally. Only open 8am to 5pm, the help desk was not available the hours students needed help the most. Because of limited resources and heavy workloads, the help desk was often unable to provide same-day responses to student and faculty requests. There was also a lack of documented institutional knowledge and concrete metrics. A school steeped in strong tradition, change at times was scary and not always easy.

UVA realized they needed to start looking at ways to meet the community’s needs more effectively and efficiently. With over 40,000 users, UVA wanted to consolidate service desks, capture knowledge, improve operational processes, control costs, extend hours of support and drive exceptional customer experiences.

After attending a national conference and hearing Arizona State University speak about their success in outside partnering their help desk function, the wheels started turning, and the research began.

James Hilton, CIO, stated, “After gathering a great deal of information from schools that outsourced, visiting ASU and seeing their impressive process and results, and hearing consistent positive feedback about Perceptis—we knew Perceptis would be a great partner in helping us achieve our help desk and customer services goals.” A 6-year engagement was signed to provide a 24/7 Unified Service Center.

Our Solution

Perceptis’ help desk support model for outsourcing is about managing the function with a trusted partner who becomes part of the staff, not just a vendor. It is built on a clear vision of shared service and collaboration, customization, and collecting key data and metrics to drive root cause analysis, eliminate recurring problems and improve business processes.

Perceptis is credited in the higher education community for greatly improving customer experiences. They do this by recognizing that “one size does NOT fit all,” and that each school needs a solution that is customized to their specific needs.

Perceptis’ implementation team, in conjunction with UVA, created a rich knowledge base tailored to UVA’s top issues and included customized information and answers on everything from general IT to their Oracle Financial Aid, HR and Payroll to their PeopleSoft SIS. Students, faculty and staff were now given several choices in ways to receive help, using whichever method is most convenient for them: phone, email, chat and web-submission.

Driving a customer-focused support model and providing high-quality customer service were key goals for UVA. Receiving over 35,000 calls a year, Perceptis implemented a dedicated team approach with agents that strictly supported UVA, Monday – Friday, 7am to 7pm. These agents went through a rigorous 6 week training course at UVA, becoming experts on the UVA environment. Using data captured from the calls, Perceptis also was able to identify new topics requiring support. Perceptis developed the necessary training and held bi-weekly training sessions spotlighting these issues. All of this resulted in positive customer surveys and high customer satisfaction at UVA.

To provide UVA measureable results and drive exceptional service for their community, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) were established which included performance metrics such as Average Speed to Answer (phone, email, chat), First Call Resolution and Customer Satisfaction. Establishing SLAs clearly defines expectations for both UVA and Perceptis.

Terry Lockard, Director of Computing Support Services, ITC said, “Partnering with Perceptis has given our diverse and mobile community exactly what they needed: quality IT help at anytime, from anywhere.”

UVA leveraged Perceptis’ analytics tool, AnalysIS©. The AnalysIS dashboard gave UVA staff daily reporting and weekly trends on Incident Volume, Average Speed to Answer, Negative Abandonment, First Call Resolution and Customer Satisfaction. AnalysIS allowed UVA total transparency throughout the support process. The data that Perceptis gave UVA—specifically aging and open tickets—also enabled UVA to manage their internal staff better; thus, providing better results and quicker resolution for Tier 2 and Tier 3 issues while also realizing internal process improvements.

“The Perceptis team was in constant communication with us through the entire process, from the implementation, to training on their tools, on-site meetings and really getting to know our team. All of this helped contribute to the ‘partnering’ aspect,” shared Hilton.

The Results

Perceptis and UVA achieved the following measureable results:

• 90% First Call Resolution
• 51 second Average Speed to Answer
• 4.3 Customer Satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5
• Expanded coverage to 24/7 while reducing annual operating budget by 15%
• A partner with responsibility from beginning to end so staff can focus on core duties
• Well-documented processes
  

“After going live, Perceptis continued communication, providing daily and weekly stats, as well as valuable information that not only helped us improve processes, making the customer experience even better, but also helped us make improvements in other areas,” said Hilton.