Client Success Story: Reducing Downtime with a Proactive SME Team Approach

CHALLENGES

Our client manager, who was responsible for supporting more than 10,000 retail service points in the United States, was challenged with establishing a support center for the retail organizations to contact and resolve any problems. The environment he inherited had retail service points calling six different groups to figure out which organization was responsible for any problem that prevented his store(s) from processing transactions. More than one million transactions a day and billions in revenue were at risk. The normal maintenance and upgrades of equipment also needed to be addressed. Vendors who repaired equipment or communication services also needed to be managed as part of the support structure. The manager’s vision was to create one focused group that took all the support calls and coordinated communication with any other internal group or external vendor to get resolution on behalf of the retail service points.

SOLUTIONS

Odyssey Information Services, which was already providing consulting services to the company, proposed a team solution of subject matter experts and one focused support team that was designed to expand and evolve over time. The goal was to have a clear support process for any problems and ensure the retail support points had maximum up-time and minimum impact from any infrastructure issues or changes.

External Support Group

First, we created a team to receive all support calls from the retail support points, including maintenance and upgrades, and log and track them to resolution. The group established a detailed notification structure to inform the internal organization or outside vendor of any service issues.

Automation and Tracking of Events

In order to keep tabs on the massive amount of data coming from a large range of equipment, our team added automated intelligence to review logs and notifications to quickly identify problems. A database was added to track and review all events to look for trends in equipment failures and enforce SLAs for hardware and service vendors.

Diagnostics Training

In an effort to further reduce repair time, we trained our support team to diagnose endpoint equipment, retail and satellite. When a problem occurred with these infrastructure components, the support desk personnel, who were working with retail service points, could quickly determine the source of the failure and get the correct vendor and any parts dispatched with one call.

SMEs Added to Support Group

As our support solutions continued to evolve, we decided to include SMEs as part of our support group. First, we added platform systems experts to provide quick resolution to any platform problems, ensure optimal performance, review capacity and interface to the platform vendors for maintenance, repairs and upgrades. Next, we added network analysts to monitor and maintain a network that had multiple communication paths where no single component failure could impact production. Network support worked with hardware and telecommunication vendors to ensure equipment was configured, maintained and supported correctly. They created a database of configurations and issues that became a focal point to resolve vendor hardware problems and validate changes.

RESULTS

Up-time increased to over 98%

Response time reduced to minutes, if not seconds, in most cases

24/7 support availability allowed upgrades to be managed at off-peak times

Odyssey has since expanded its role with the company’s retail market to become part of its global support teams.

We welcome the opportunity to discuss your needs further and customize our solutions to meet your specific requirements.