Case Study: All Covered Has Client Support Covered

All Covered is a seven-year-old, nationwide IT outsourcing service company that focuses on the unique computing, networking, and application needs of small to mid-size businesses, as well as branch offices of larger enterprises. All Covered has 24 offices in the U.S. supporting the infrastructure, servers, and desktop needs of clients. The company’s consultants work with clients to analyze and strategically plan technology needs and implementations. Almost all of their client implementations are on the client site with an increasing amount of support managed remotely.

All Covered has 300 employees and 2,500 clients that they actively visit on a regular basis. They also have a number of clients that are on a plan that provides support and services on an as-needed basis.

All Covered's consultants regularly pre-book time with clients, so unexpected service calls from other clients can interrupt that time and impact the quality of service. Trying to troubleshoot service calls solely by phone was inefficient; typically taking several calls to talk a customer through their issue to resolution. What the company needed to become more efficient and lower cost was a way to support customers remotely. To provide this level of service to a growing client base, All Covered implemented WebEx’ Support Center almost two years ago. “At that time, we did most of our support on-site,” said Mark Grimse, IT Director for All Covered. “We started by supporting internal clients and we’re extending that out to our external clients now. We’re figuring out what we can and can’t do with clients, limited by their comfort and security requirements.”

Support Center gave them the ability to actively view customer desktops and walk customers through resolutions, usually on the first call. The company estimates that 85% of calls the company receives now result in a WebEx session, and Support Center relieves the service call load on their consultants, helping them to stay more productive with fewer interruptions to their daily schedule.

So far, the experience supporting external clients has ranged from “good to excellent,” said Grimse. “About 80%-90% of our task calls or technical assistance calls are handled and completed over WebEx.” These are largely calls in which an All Covered support rep takes control over a client machine to resolve the support call. In their business, 60%-70% of these calls are desktop issues with most of the rest being server-based issues.

Though the company isn’t using the number of calls handled or cases solved as a measure of success, they are using customer satisfaction and whether the tasks are done to validate their returns on investment. To maintain a high level of customer satisfaction, Grimse said they aren’t looking at the remote solution to reduce the amount of travel they do to customer sites. They’ll use their remote support capabilities to solve any problems that occur between scheduled visits if possible.

Implementing the WebEx applications is “extremely easy” according to Grimse. The support person uses the online, on-demand WebEx application to initiate a support session based on a customer call. They then direct the client to link to the WebEx site and log into the support session. If they’re new to the application, they have to download the WebEx module and the support rep can begin to resolve the issue. The hosted WebEx application is branded to All Covered.

All Covered is paying particular attention to improvements in business productivity and efficiency, and customer satisfaction as the metrics for success. “This solution lets us do more of what we already do without adding staff,” said Grimse.