Disparate systems from different vendors were tying up agents and technicians of a London, Ont. contact centre service firm Alliance iCommunications, until the company made a drastic move to completely replace its desk management, remote support and IT monitoring systems.

“The systems we had were fine when we were still a startup,” according to Derek Lightfoot, director of technology for Alliance. ”However, as the company grew, we found that the lack of integration from the products we were using was causing serious issues.”

Last November, the company decided to replace its systems with the Go ToAssist integrated remote support and service desk modules from cloud computing company Citrix.

Alliance previously used three “dissimilar systems,” said Lightfoot:

• TeamViewer – a software tracts help desk personnel and remote agents
• Service Desk Plus – a standalone application for tracking contact centre tickets
• GFI Service Monitor – a product that monitors key systems, exchange servers and Web servers

“The main problem with this arrangement is that the dissimilar systems caused workflow bottlenecks and integration problems,” said Lightfoot. “The issues were manageable when we were a small operation, but in our current expansion mode this was a major headache.”

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For example, three different systems required three different log-in procedures and three different support processes. The situation impacted the ticket creation process where in many instances it took an hour for the average ticket to be acted on.

“There were times, when agents and technicians wanted  to avoid creating tickets because there were just to many fields to fill out that it took so much time,” according to the IT director.

Alliance’s old system also did not enable agents and technicians to properly categorize calls so that they could be escalated when the situation demands. This resulted in the company designating a person to monitor the calls and manually categorize them.

After considering other vendors, Alliance, decided to replace their system with Citrix’s Go ToAssist. Lightfoot said the remote support, service desk and monitoring modules of Got ToAssist provided users with an integrated tool that replaced Alliance’s three dissimilar systems.

For instance, it had an attached support feature that provided remote technicians the privilege to log into the system and input ticket changes which was not available in the previous system.

A monitoring feature, allowed support teams to manage, inventory and scan the company’s networks, servers and service from a single dashboard rather than having to open multiple screens.

These improvements enabled agents and technicians to cut down average ticket processing time from one hour to just 20 minutes.

The new system’s time tracking feature, which enable administrators to dive deeper into the time and services provided to clients by Alliance personnel was most instrumental in boosting the company’s bottom line.

“The tracking feature enabled us to record more efficiently at the end of the month the hours spent and type of work rendered for each client,” said Lightfoot. “This enhanced calculation ability boosted out billing results.”

The Citrix system was also cheaper. Alliance’s previous subscription-based expenses amounted to around $16,000/year for three systems. Go ToAssist, will cost the company just $9,000/year, said Lightfoot.