How to Manage Customer Support
Requests in the Government Sector
Online customer support requests have become relevant in every field under the sun. Naturally, it would reach the government sector as well. After all, now that the pandemic has made online interactions the new normal, the entire world has to adapt. That meant any company with hopes of entering the government sector would need to be prepared to cater to the constant stream of inquiries that would be coming in.
Let’s take an example with a Saudi IT company established in 2013 with a clear vision of becoming the first choice for IT management in the Saudi government sector. With approximately 500 employees on hand, the company’s leading business line focused on IT services. From data center solutions to software development, and IT service management. That, in turn, has created a need for an advanced support team capable of managing requests from clients using any support channel, such as call center, email, customer portals, social media, and so on. So, how did the company manage that?
The Challenge
Initially, the company was using Jira Software to manage the development life cycle, and Zendesk to manage customer support requests. This led to integration and communication issues between both the development and support teams.
The Solution
To deal with the problem, the company adopted Jira Service Management to have an effective and unified tool for the main ITSM processes.
Jira Service Management
Infosysta, a Platinum Atlassian Solution Partner, implemented Jira Service Management following ITIL features, terminologies, workflows, and functional requirements.
With over 60 call center agents working on the three main support portals (internal, client, and product portals), Infosysta’s plan was to migrate each portal to Jira Service Management with the support of the main 4 ITIL processes as a start. Incident management would follow one and a half months later. The internal support portal was to go live once the main ITIL process was implemented.
The main purpose of the plan was to deliver an agile system. The flexibility of Jira and its Marketplace allowed the company to have their customized processes, queues, SLAs, real-time reports, and dashboards in no time.
Twitter Connector for Jira
While Jira Service Management was an effective solution, there was still a challenge to support customers coming through Twitter.
We introduced Twitter Connector for Jira as a robust solution that converts all relevant mentions and direct messages into tickets and makes it easy for the support team to collaborate on these tickets without leaving the comfort of the helpdesk. With Twitter Connector for Jira, we were able to link each JSM project to a different Twitter account, allowing the agent to reply to tweets and direct messages from the Jira ticket.
The Outcome
Thanks to the integration between Jira Software and Jira Service Management, the company was able to solve the main pain points in the processes. The issues ranged from poor incident management, lack of visibility on development work, releases, and no single dashboard for performance measurement and KPIs.
Being on top of SLAs agreed with the customer, and achieving the shortest resolution of any incident was the first achieved KPIs. After unifying the system, there was no more incomplete information on the tickets. This eliminated the incessant back-and-forth, leading to a shorter time to reach a resolution.
So, with the help of Jira Service management, the company was able to:
- Get rid of the integration and multi-license for each user
- Boost collaboration between teams
- Automate the development cycle and the support tickets to keep the support team and the clients updated
- Allow customers to build efficient reports and dashboards using one application