Anakage Service Desk Optimizer

The IT Service Desk department at a MNC, with 200,000 global users spread geographically was looking at challenges of non-linear growth. The employees of the company, mostly tech-savvy, having immense respect for their time, wait to be serviced by tech support team while a few enterprising ones will read the self-help articles and find a way out of the issues.  Unavoidable IT staff turnover and high demand for more technology resources intersected, leaving the IT support leadership grappling with the question on how to provide a non-linear help desk support as the number of employees to be supported keep increasing.

“We need to raise our game, both in terms of knowledge and operational efficiency”, the company’s Support Desk Director, thought years back, thinking of the situation. “So we thought of looking at best of the breed products that claimed to automate workstation support, as a way to align strategically with our goals of non-linear support model”, the Director said.

The Director was not alone in seeking a leaner support organization without bursting an IT budget for costly self-heal, self-service and end point automation products. Probably if you are reading this thus far, you are “him”. At this point he / you had/have double thoughts: “Can technology increase employee adoption of self-service? I know I have tried promoting self-help articles but failed. I need something else….”

Moreover for the compliance issues, remote team could do little in terms of remote remediation and the physical engineers had to chase up employees to physically remediate the compliance issues reported against the employee’s machines. While employees could go to self-help portal and run fixes to stay compliant, but it’s hard to expect this when there are no direct incentives or penalties associated with this good corporate samaritan behaviour.

Finally, every minute that an employee can’t do his or her job due to a computer problem is a minute of lost productivity, and lost productivity costs businesses a lot of money.

The Director was convinced of the need for something simple, effective and economical, unlike some of the costly products which claimed to solve all issues but failed to demonstrate the value at the floor (read real life Pilots had failed in past at the organization).

Anakage a start-up, in Bangalore, had the courage and faith to approach the Director with it’s innovation. Anakage’s product was technically complex but based on a simple idea that users will self-service if it is simple to do and actually solves the user issue. Anakage bundled step by step assistance in live product for troubleshooting with routine steps automation giving a user the knowledge and dexterity to act as if she was a trained technician. Besides assisted self-service Anakage brought in compliance remediation and self-heal into the solution, one single executable file which gets invoked by user on demand.

The IT Service Desk Director saw the potential and championed the value creation opportunity, giving the start-up an early customer (a very big one at that). Anakage identified the incident volume drivers to rapidly build self-service solutions for Lync, Skype, Internet Explorer, Outlook, Windows, Symantec along with common printer issues.

A simple yet effective way of encouraging self-service finally started gaining traction. Employees loved the tool and the usage hits thousands in the first week of launch itself. The tool will report usage metrics thus providing transparency on usage effectiveness.

The agent did not require admin rights for resolving most issues and a simple synchronisation will refresh the content on all user machines.

On an average up to 50% of Level 1 calls are self-serviceable including password reset issues. The cost avoidance is huge and creates a non linear growth model for Service Desk function.

Anakage is not only building solutions for self-service but also training employees on Advanced XLS and is building out Service Desk training modules to train and certify Service Desk agents.

“Its really Excellent way to resolve issues independently and immediately. ”                      

“The visual way in which problem is solved in seconds is awesome !!”

“Step by step guideline to troubleshoot issue yourself… just tremendous. Loved it :)”

“Quick and easy to use the self help service. Solved my issue in a jiffy.”

“This has reduced the waiting period and resolution is fast.”

“That was amazing, I just followed all the suggested steps and issue got resolved”

All in all ANAKAGE is a “ticket” to exponential growth!