A recent independent survey conducted by
http://www.h2index.com a leading IT research company which specialises in quantifying and comparing IT management practice in the world's largest companies has highlighted the adoption of Live Chat within Service Desk environments.
Leading organisations taking part in the survey included companies operating within Finance, Pharmaceuticals, Energy, Retail, Electronics and Chemical Industries.
One of the key findings of the survey highlighted that phone was still the preferred method for contacting internal IT service desks. However, the findings highlighted the use of Live Chat and its gathering momentum. Indeed it could overtake email channels which have traditionally been seen as offering long, unstructured conversations that are offer a poor customer experience. In one organisation an astonishing 65-70% of consumers polled in the survey said they would use Live Chat.
The survey highlighted Intel, a leading manufacturer of computer processors, and its approach to service desk infrastructure. It was an early adopter of Live Chat in 2004, as part of a radical support program in 2004 that helped achieve in part a 35% reduction in support costs. Today within Intel, chat has overtaken email support as a preferred method of contact. As a direct result of the improvement in contact options for its customers in 2009, customer satisfaction was above 90% and 80% of problems were resolved on a first-time fix basis.
The h2index survey compared three different approaches to offering a chat capability. This confirmed that Live Chat was not only the most advanced and mature offering, it was also most cost effective compared to Enterprise Instant Messaging and traditional Service Desk platforms as illustrated in the table below.
| Enterprise Instant Messaging - General Internal Use | Service Desk Platforms | Live Chat |
| Examples | Microsoft OCS, Lotus Same Time, Jabber | Right Now, Avaya Telephony | www.WhosOn.com |
| Features | Integrates with enterprise office applications | Basic functionality | Mature products - richest functionality |
| Service Desk Suitability |
Not adapted for service desk use - no queue capability & difficult to integrate with other tools | Designed for service desk Use | Designed and proven for service desk use |
Additional findings within the survey focused on the operational impact and improvement of employee productivity as a result of Live Chat implementation, in particular the ability for agents to handle multiple chats simultaneously whilst still having the ability to handle calls. This can lead to significant cost savings.
The survey concluded that Live Chat was a cost-effective way of testing a new channel to an internal IT service desk. The feedback received from early adopters of Live Chat demonstrated that it was a brilliant way of improving the customer service desk experience, and its ease of implementation and low set-up cost in comparison to other service desk options made it an attractive proposition to implement.
About h2index
h2index was founded in 2004 by Phil Hopley and Andy Hubbard. During their time in senior IT management roles within large organisations such as Unilever, Phil and Andy found that many IT departments operated in a vacuum, basing performance measurement largely on internal metrics which failed to acknowledge and learn from the wider IT community in which they operated. Existing external resources, such as benchmarking services, provided flawed information by comparing companies of differing scales and complexities, and delivered little insight into how companies could learn from the IT strategies of their peers.
After consulting IT executives from across a range of major multinational companies, Phil and Andy established h2index to introduce a new way of improving IT performance based on proper performance measurement and a more formal process for understanding best practice.