Shropshire County Council, Increasing Efficiency in Shropshire (iSupport)

When faced with the brief of increasing the efficiency of its IT helpdesk, Shropshire County Council opted to upgrade to c.Support (now iSupport).The council's Resources Directorate were handling around 2,000 internal calls a month. After using Tricostar's c.Support for just one month, that number rose to 3,000.IT Customer Support Manager Neil Langford said: "The department handles both telephone and email calls and the support staff would spend a great deal of time on the phone talking customers through their queries."Every time we log a telephone call an incident ticket is generated which can be easily monitored and referred back to at a later date, but we were consistently seeing a backlog of email requests."The advantage of using c.Support is that it has the capacity to automatically convert emails into incident tickets as well, which saves a huge amount of time, both for the support staff and for the customer awaiting an urgent response to their enquiry."The c.Support system is a high-quality, strategic helpdesk application that keeps users and systems productive by enabling them to answer calls, resolve issues, anticipate events and prevent problems.It was developed in partnership with GWI and enables organisations to run an internal or customer-facing helpdesk. It is designed to fit any size and type of operation or infrastructure."The c.Support system is proving especially useful for those customers who are uncomfortable speaking to technically-minded staff and using jargon," explains Neil. "The self-help features, FAQs, discussion groups and knowledge database function mean that customers can often resolve their own problem without needing to speak to an IT Customer Support Officer."As a result of upgrading to c.Support, we can now offer a 24 hour-a-day, 7 day-a-week service, even when there's no-one in the office."Shropshire County Council is now making plans to roll out c.Support across all of its directorates. In particular, the Human Resources department is interested in accessing c.Support's call logging facility.Neil said: "c.Support is a highly flexible product but the real beauty lies in its simplicity. The training is quick and straightforward, and all 70 of our IT staff have found it a pleasure to operate."We have a user base of around 3,500 and, from those people, I have had only encouraging feedback."Jeff Lawler, Tricostar's Managing Director, said: "We are delighted to be working with Shropshire County Council, which recognised the need for a modern and functional helpdesk in order to meet demand."We look forward to hearing more about the positive impact c.Support has had on their operation."