While Applaud’s Managing Director Ricci Danieletto spearheads the expansion and day-to-day operation of Applaud’s Australian and Hong Kong based offices, its Chief Operating Officer, William Gibb, oversees the critical services operation from the company’s Network Operations and Service Desk ‘nerve centre’ in St Leonards, Sydney.
William Gibb is one of the founding partners of Applaud and has been heavily involved and invested in Applaud since its inception in 2004. Affectionately known by all as Will, he manages the Managed Services division which in effect supports 1000′s and 1000′s of end users across Australia and New Zealand.
Will shares his thoughts and wealth of experience in running a Service Desk (SD) and reveals a few humorous and outrageous SD incidents as well.
Q1: What Makes the Applaud’s SD stand out from the rest?
Will: Our Service Desk is the heartbeat of our organisation. It is the key component in the IT support services we offer our customers. It is Australian based and running 24/7/365, We invest a lot of training into our Service desk so we can ensure our team members provide professional and personable service each and every single time. We focus on our team and their environment to ensure that they are happy at work, challenged and enjoy helping our customers. If our team is happy then so are our customers.
Q2. What Makes a successful SD?
Will: A successful Service Desk has a team that understand their importance to an organisation in the I.T support framework and feel valued. Structured in a way that is highly processed driven and providing a consistent repeatable service across all team members. A successful service desk, answers the phone in a timely manner, can resolve a high percentage of calls on that first call and also in a manner that the customer is left with an outcome of thinking that “I would be more than happy to call the Service Desk again as the experience was positive and they helped me.”
Q3. How many tickets do the SD close per month on average?
Will: The Service Desk resolve over 5000 incidents and request per month.
Q4. What is the most common ticket your team have to deal with on a daily basis?
Will: Beside the common issues of password resets and account lock outs, most tickets relate to access issues and requests relating standard products (e.g. Office suite) and Client specific applications.
Q5. What is the most outrageous/weird ticket your team has ever received?
Will: We have had people call to report issues with toasters or microwaves in their corporate kitchens! If it has power going in to it, we can get a call about it. We once received a request from an end user needing advice on how to operate a water pressure washer. On a positive side, this means that if a customer is having an issue they look to call our Service Desk because they know we will try and resolve it and if we cannot resolve it at the Service Desk we will be able to advise them on who to contact.
The Applaud outsourced Service Desk facility provides its clients with an extremely efficient and cost-effective solution which can deliver:
- Comprehensive Service Desk consisting of Level 1 through to level 3 Engineers that are service orientated
- Network Operations Centre – Monitoring and managing alerts on your environment. Letting you sleep at night knowing that of there is an alert that the necessary steps have been taken
- Service Desk Overflow to accommodate busy/peak periods
- After-Hours plus Service Desk Overflow – allowing you to have your core team working in your core business hours. You do not want to burn out your team by asking them to work out of hours or being on call constantly. Keep your team happy by getting Applaud to handle these functions after hours
- Whatever the aspect or part of your IT infrastructure that you would like to be managed and handled by a trusted partner
If you would like to learn more about the operational aspects of the Applaud Managed Services Division, Will is happy to talk to you, he can be reached at (02) 8437 2424 or emailed: wgibb@applaudservices.com
