The good news was that this firm had tremendous growth, more than doubling the amount of personnel and 18 world-wide offices. The bad news was that calls to the IT help desk often went unanswered, aggravating business users and dampening morale of the group designated to provide service.
Senior Global Financial Operations/Technology Executive, Eric Speicher, was asked to fix this issue and I’ve invited him to tell us how he did that.
Eric Speicher’s firm had tremendous growth 2009-2012, more than doubling the amount of personnel and world-wide offices. Some offices had established support personnel kept as a part of acquisitions, some had relationships with external vendors for on-call support as needed. His firm had investment professionals on the road, across the globe, travelling to research and close deals; the support they knew was at their home office, working only those business hours. At headquarters, calls to the IT help desk often went unanswered, aggravating business users and dampening morale of the group designated to provide service. In a squeaky-wheel environment, executives would directly contact the CIO, COO, and CFO directly to get their attention.
Eric said, “…the original direction from the C-suites was to remove low performing personnel and increase the staffing substantially in the larger offices. First, I investigated the situation, starting at headquarters, I interviewed key individuals from all levels in the company and came to the realization that a global solution would be required for our high-profile world travelling professionals. I visited the 17 US, European, and Asian offices to assess the quality of technology assistance and detail the current challenges. I met with all the individuals and firms providing technology support to assess their capabilities and determination. I developed and deployed a company-wide survey to track IT support satisfaction, to measure the impact of changes.
“I shared my insights with the CIO and COO. Developing a plan of action, I worked with an offshore vendor who provided some extension-model staff augmentation to our application development and accounting teams, I gauged their interest in starting supplying services for a level-1 help desk. After negotiating the structure and cost, I consolidated my findings into a plan that complemented each home-office staff with an offshore contingent responsible for resolving routine problems on a 7/24/365 schedule. Additionally, I made some local support staff changes to keep those with the strongest customer-service mindset and good technical problem-solving skills.”
There was a great deal of concern about reducing the quality of services to our highly demanding workforce by having them interact with offshore personnel. “I created a detailed-rollout plan that included a department-by-department and location-by-location release of their services. I personally interviewed each member of the new team and created a training program where the more experienced local support personnel created work-aids to document the best way to handle different type of queries. I added process and technology to track, resolve issues to ensure that they were successfully resolved and to receive feedback on the caliber of the service provided. I personally led the final training and initial production phase from our Hyderabad office, embedded with the level-1 team..
“Our disciplined introduction of the new service provided adequate time for each department to develop trust in the skills and dedication of the expanded workforce. Later, I augmented, the personal interaction by having individuals from the level-1 team visit Los Angeles and other offices where they could train directly with the more experienced local support team members and establish in-person relationships with colleagues that they had been supporting remotely,” Speicher said.
By the end of the first year of operation, documented surveys validated a rise from 2.8 to 4.5 (scale of 5) in customer satisfaction, the complaining noise to the C-level leaders went away and Eric received accolades from the teams of travelling investment professionals. “The new organization provided improved services resulting in a net $500K decrease in annually overhead which was well below the corporate plan,” Speicher said.
Watch full video interview below.
Contact Eric via LinkedIn or his Career WebFolio.
Fred Coon, CEO
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