Hitachi Europe, part of the Japanese conglomerate giant Hitachi, is one of the world’s leading technology companies. They develop technologies and provide services in sectors as varied as consumer technology, IT, heavy industry, automotive and even nuclear. The Information Systems Group (IFG) is one of the five business units of Hitachi Europe.
Hitachi’s IFG is dedicated to providing best-of-breed solutions, consultancy and support and training services for their enterprise IT solutions. Additionally, IFG is qualified to deal with designing, implementing and supporting the technologies they provide and is spread across Europe, Middle East and Africa with its headquarters in the United Kingdom.
Mohsin Chaudhry, the group’s security solutions consultant, kindly agreed to share their team’s Kayako experience and told us why they chose Kayako for their helpdesk, the kind of value Kayako has delivered to their business and how that fits in and facilitates Hitatchi’s IFG customer support philosophy.
“Our support staff keeps for Kayako what I call a ‘steady even keel’”
The IFG’s services have hardly been something to complain about, but as the number of community sites has ballooned, so has the number of support tickets and issues coming in. Mohsin credits Kayako with enabling his support team to respond to 6,000 tickets in a single month.
“By using Kayako to respond to hundreds of tickets at a time, my Support staff keeps for Kayako what I call a ‘steady even keel’, leaving them free to create a more proactive support infrastructure and address any larger support issue which may arise.”
Kayako’s ability to handle support tickets en masse proved to be a tremendous help in addressing site-wide problems, settling hundreds of tickets in a few actions (sometimes with as little as just one response).
And while the company’s support team has significantly expanded, the same features that made them efficient when they were small continue to fuel that same caliber of efficiency as the team continues to grow.
“When we have a site issue that’s happening on 800 different communities, multiply that by the number of people who are paying attention to each individual site. One incident would blow up with literally hundreds of tickets in a short amount of time.”
Building a knowledgebase encourages smarter inquiries
By building a well organized and easy to navigate knowledgebase, customers get encouraged to search and find their own answers to commonly asked questions. The more knowledge that can be collected and reused, the more agent time can be spared and the faster issues can be diagnosed and resolved. Inspired from this, more recently IFG has been building out their knowledgebase.
“We’ve found that with a built out knowledgebase, we are suddenly getting much smarter questions from customers. When customers contact us, they often reference articles that they saw which helps explain the context of their question. It makes our jobs much easier when our customers are better informed.”
“People are shy so you have to led by example. We try to give people a framework to encourage sharing. Moreover, the biggest challenge is just getting people to the knowledgebase. So we try to build compelling content to attract them there. We’ve recently posted a lot of how-to articles”.
“By pulling them onto the knowledgebase it’s easier for people to find the articles when they need them.”
An easy-to-access helpdesk encourages rapid user adoption
“We knew firsthand that Kayako was a flexible, intuitive solution, and we found it cost-effective to implement,” says Mohsin. “Throughout our implementation process, Kayako’s support staff was extremely helpful and attentive.
Mass-ticket actions, ticket macros (prescribed responses), and ease of assigning tickets to other staff members have been a huge help to the IFG. “Our productivity and efficiency has improved immensely since switching to the Kayako software.
“With Kayako, we’ve revamped our entire help desk operation. Employees are giving lots of feedback along the lines, ‘This is so easy! Why didn’t you guys do this much sooner?’”
Mohsin’s team had a lot to say about working with Kayako’s interface. “Its simplicity and minimal settings made it easy for agents to begin using it right away, without the need for custom programming, which can sometimes cost a company weeks of valuable time.”
The IFG had used other help desk systems before, and found many of them to have clunky, complicated user interfaces that got in the way of agent productivity. With Kayako, even those who had never used help desk software could hit the ground running.
Improving efficiency and enabling personalized customer support
It seems almost paradoxical, but Kayako has helped the team to increase the efficiency of its help desk and support operation overall, but not at the cost of personalized customer support – even having taken advantage of Kayako’s automation and bulk management tools, the team can provide human customer support; the personalization of email and the efficiency of a robust helpdesk.
Using Kayako’s helpesk reporting and analytics engine, Mohsin can check ticket volumes, response times and a range of other statistics to get an immediate sense of performance, productivity and even identify potential problem tickets early on.
“With Kayako, we can easily identify trends in the questions our members are asking, and then use this information to guide our product development decisions.”
“Moreover, our job is to keep our employees – happy and productive. Kayako has already solved so many issues for us, and has given us a holistic view of customer satisfaction so that we can keep improving on what we’re offering.”