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The next critical success factors should be a focus of service delivery in order to achieve excellence from centralization:

· Greater understanding of the customer organizations' culture by the servicing geography

· Acknowledgment of process, technical, and cultural gaps in the servicing geography

· Continuous improvement road map to bridge gaps periodically

· Strong communication channel and a continuous exchange of knowledge and information

The other opportunity lies in ensuring that there are designated account managers in the major geographies that are being serviced. They provide a continuous communication channel to the service delivery organization with knowledge regarding user expectations, cultural awareness, changes in technology, and other challenges in service delivery.

It is practically impossible for multilocation organizations to have a local service desk at each geographic location. In some cases there may not even be an IT presence at remote or smaller sites, which are typically satellite offices connected to the corporate network but with a small number of employees—sales offices, for example.

Decentralized service desks are built to provide in-person assistance. They are also implemented when support is required in local languages.

Another popular mechanism of service delivery is a combination of centralized, global, and outsourced service delivery. Outsourcing enables organizations to leverage third parties that have built delivery models and other strengths from years of experience. It also allows scale-up and scale-down of resources and delivery models based on seasonal and other time-sensitive requirements.

Outsourcers bring models, tools, workforce, and processes with a variety of options. Options available with outsourcers may not readily fit into the needs of the organization being serviced. Critical decision points to be considered include:

· Identification of performance measurement metrics. These require fine-tuning over time, as the previously identified measurement parameters based on contractual agreements may not be strongly connected with the real-time customer experience. In an effort to drive process and performance, third parties may dilute the customer experience.

· Tools and processes for ticket management, change management, asset management, and knowledge also require fine-tuning.

· Outsourcing the service to a third party will require a definite investment to bring the third party closer to the culture of customer organization. If the service is outsourced to a third party in another geography, additional investment and training will be required in building soft skills, customer service etiquettes, and understanding of cultural differences.

Building rapport with customers is yet another piece of the puzzle in real-time interactions. Rapport building can increase the call-handling time and will impact the overall service desk performance. In the case of real-time interactions, to simplify rapport-building conversations with customers, organizations may broadcast updates on events in the customer's location. These broadcasts educate service desk staff about major news, events, weather details, celebrations, and sporting events at the customers' sites.

Real-time interactions provide a greater customer experience, but they come with their own price tag. Evolution of technology has provided options to increase self-service usage through knowledge bases, IVR, and other tools for account password resets. These are the alternatives, in order of decreasing customer interaction and increasing self-service capabilities:

· Regarding service delivery, the first choice is to have an IT analyst walk to your desk. This method works very well. It allows easy rapport building as well as addressing issues other than your primary request. This is a luxury and not a very pragmatic solution as the cost of doing so is very high.

· The next best option is to make available phone-based support where you still have a remote but real-time conversation. Customers call into a service desk phone queue. For seamless access from any of the offices, it is desirable to have a single extension to call across geographies. Although this is a personalized delivery of service, it does not allow the IT analyst to attend to multiple customers at the same time. In cases when there are multiple queues of servicing organizations, the phone systems are coupled with IVR and computer telephony integration (CTI). IVR allows customers to provide basic information about their query so that the call can be forwarded to an analyst skilled with the specific query type. This increases the probability of FCR. CTI is a simple integration of customer profile information on the service delivery systems with telephony. Customers input a recognizable code during the dial time so that all relevant information about their profile and history of existing reported but unresolved problems is automatically populated. This results in reduced handling time and enhanced customer experience.

· With the evolution of the Internet and intranets, knowledge is easily accessible from the workstations. There is no service desk personnel engagement, but this method requires end users to dedicate time. Even though staff engagement does not exist, the content presented to customers can be personalized based on nature of their jobs and queries that they are trying to resolve. When a particular query is searched, the resolution can be in the form of sequential steps to walk end users through the solution. In some cases, solutions are built to detect the problems automatically and fix them based on known solutions.

· In an absolute cost-conscious setup where the volume of requests is very high with a high degree of variation, organizations use e-mail as a medium. Turnaround is not as effective and not as personalized. In these situations, the service is typically outsourced, and it is probably the most inexpensive service delivery option. Customer experience can get compromised with this approach.