Enhancing the Customer Experience: A New Standard for Workforce Management

HumanTouch, LLC, has become a leader in help desk services throughout the federal government. For over 8 years, HT has provided help desk, desk side services and system administration support services to the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Commerce and the Department of the Treasury. Our award-winning and high-performing staff delivers services to over 25,000 federal government customers nationwide. 

However, we never rest on our laurels. HT believes that to provide value to our customers, we must always raise the bar and innovate. Continuous improvement is a core component of HT’s value proposition so we are constantly seeking ways to improve performance.

Taking A Look Beneath the Surface

Over the past year, we have placed a specific focus on sharpening our workforce management procedures for our current and future service delivery customers.

WhatIs.com defines workforce management as “an integrated set of processes used to optimize the productivity of employees and involves matching employee skills to specific tasks over time. Workforce management quantifies the amount and types of labor needed to accomplish particular jobs on a day-to-day and hour-to-hour basis.”

Through recent engagements, we have conceptualized ways to implement the following components of workforce management:

• Comprehensive service delivery and process analysis
• Talent management
• Training programs
• Employee scheduling and attendance tracking
• Performance monitoring and reporting
• Crisis preparedness/risk management
• Comprehensive forecasting of workload

We knew that we had dedicated, knowledgeable and customer service-oriented staff, but we recently discovered that we were missing uniform, repeatable, timely processes, known and agreed to by all HT staff members. In addition, we did not have a reliable way to forecast our workload and schedule our staff accordingly – so there was plenty of room for improvement.

Devising a Solution

In seeking a solution to the problem, we decided to review HT’s

1. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), how to’s, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), knowledge bases and personal “manuals”
2. Recruiting and hiring processes, staff development efforts, retention initiatives, and training (group, one-on-one and ad hoc)
3. Existing employee scheduling and attendance tracking processes to ensure we have ready staff when they were most needed
4. Performance monitoring and reporting, based on targeted metrics, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
5. Crisis preparedness and risk management solutions, particularly to ensure that we are implementing solutions that are one step ahead in guaranteeing continuous support to our customers and safeguarding the well-being of our staff members during an emergency situation

Creating Uniformity

The HumanTouch IT Book of Knowledge was generated out of the effort to put in place uniform and consistent workforce management. This new tool:

• identifies the top 40-50 IT support requests.

• creates templated, uniform and standardized process “sheets” (one-page informational documents) for each request submitted.
• provides the expected duration for accomplishment of submitted requests, including time for ticket creation, ticket journaling and ticket closure.
• confirms the information in the “sheets” for accuracy, clarity and quality.
• compiles the “sheets” in an easily accessible repository for access by all support staff on multiple devices.
• applies the requests and their durations to the available staff and forecasts how much can be accomplished per day and per week.
• is accessible on standard mobile devices so the support staff can have the information at their fingertips.

Comprehensive Training and Forecasting

To get all staff on the same track, it was critical that HT conduct comprehensive training to ensure that all support staff understand the importance of adhering to the standardized procedures.

Through this very effective team effort and by forecasting our workload and knowing our resource availability, we can now efficiently schedule our staff to meet customer demands.

Since we have identified and analyzed the top support requests and determined baseline timeframes for resolution, we have raised the bar among all of our support staff with a more comprehensive, consistent and standardized environment. Our customers are already benefitting from our innovation with enhanced, timely support.

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“Excellence in customer service and service delivery with a human touch!”