A Leading Global Insurer Creates Center of Excellence to Manage IT Helpdesk

The client, a global insurance company, found that over time its IT helpdesk activities had become quite cumbersome. Helpdesks across multiple locations further aggravated the problem as requests often went unresolved in the absence of well-defined processes. This not only led to burgeoning costs for support services but also an increase in customer and employee dissatisfaction, which negatively impacted the company’s business performance

Given the complexities involved, the company decided to seek a service provider to refine and manage its critical support function related to IT helpdesks. Additionally, changing technology also meant that there would be a need for training, monitoring and assessment cycles for support staff, which would build more costs into the system. The client engaged WNS to tighten its IT processes by creating an offshore Center of Excellence (CoE) to handle all IT helpdesk functions in order to achieve better organizational efficiency.

The Client’s Challenge

• Multiple company locations across geographies

• Lack of accountability due to inadequate and unclear support delegation

• High Turnaround Time (TAT)

• Unclear support procedures

• Customer dissatisfaction

• Employee frustration

• Growing resource costs due to delay

• High incidence of repetitive and abandoned calls

• Burden of regular training and technology updates for support functions

• Absence of data capture on requests, solutions provided and follow-up

The WNS Approach

WNS proposed an end-to-end solutions approach that involved four distinct stages. The table below represents the stages and the specific steps proposed therein:

The WNS Solution

After a detailed assessment, WNS proposed a transformational solution to set up a CoE, either onshore or offshore. After due diligence, the client decided to go ahead with a center at Chennai, India, a location WNS proposed due to the high availability of resources with requisite abilities in the IT-enabled services domain. The offshore transition started by providing helpdesk services through e-mail, voice and Web chat. Services were allocated to the following teams:

IT Access: This team controls ID and access management with mainframes. It provides end-to-end support, coordinating with downstream teams and seeks relevant authorization to meet end customer’s demand. This team averages about 10,000 user requests per month with fine quality.

Service desk: This is the first face of IT operations for external customer handling issues regarding application access and password resets. Issues out of their scope are raised as incidents with other support teams such as IT access / remote desktop. This team averages about 26,000 transactions per month. Support includes inbound voice, e-mail and chat services.

Remote desktop: This team is responsible for resolving all IT issues with users having desktops and printers. Besides internal IT infrastructure issues, it is also responsible for installation of client applications. On an average, the team processes around 3,800 incidents per month.

Extending Your Enterprise

WNS helped the client accrue a revenue savings of 60 percent in its very first year of providing an IT helpdesk outsourcing solution apart from vastly improving organizational efficiency. Some of the key result areas identified were:

• Annual revenue savings close to 60 percent

• Better process standardization using a detailed manual on process maps / flow charts

• Leveraging core competencies and reducing onshore load

• Better efficiency at lower delivery cost following a continuous process improvement model

• Improved TAT through implementing a TAT monitoring system and access provisioning

• More flexibility to changing technology environment

• Specialized and continuous training programs to help staff stay current

• Value-add in business model through customer relationship building