Managed Service Desk

As part of the Managed Service Desk solution, CMS provide our customers with a one call Service Desk for all issues related to IT.

Any IT incident, problem or query can be fed through the CMS Service Desk. These incidents are initially diagnosed by the Service Desk, troubleshooting will then result in remote fix, escalation to a third party vendor or dispatch of an onsite engineer.

The CMS Service Desk is staffed by highly skilled IT professionals who diagnose and resolve the issues quickly and promptly, as such it acts as both 1st and 2nd line for incident resolution. The engineers are not call loggers, therefore our customers IT users when contacting CMS, immediately get through to the engineers that will be fixing the issue. Their calls are not put in a queue for a Service Desk operative to get back to them, thus saving time and user frustration.

CMS currently support over 3000 IT users across their customer base with their single contact point approach. Due to this experience, CMS are confident of delivering a reliable, predictable and high value support solution. Key features of the Service Desk include:

• Service Desk record all incidents related to our customers IT Services. This includes Applications, Registered Vendor Applications, LAN, WAN, Networked Printers, Copiers, Scanners and Smart phones.
• Service desk to diagnose and determine whether the service request requires 3rd party escalation, onsite attendance or remote fix via the Service Desk.
• Where incidents are related to third party Vendors, CMS Service Desk then raise the issue with the Vendor and manage the call through to completion for the user. The Service Desk remains the point of contact throughout the incident, and reports back to the user appropriately
• User administration such as creation, deletion & archiving of numerous Active Directory accounts
• Creation and housekeeping of group membership and distribution groups
• Housekeeping of directories & file stores
• No limitations as to the number of service requests raised with the Service Desk
• Hours of Cover 24x7x365

Day to day usage of the Service Desk from our customers point of view is a very uniform experience. CMS ensure that users know what to expect, and consistently get, from the Service Desk. At a high level the incident process works as follows:

• Call placed with the Service Desk by our customers IT user
• Call is initially logged by the Operative in the system. Users details are pre-populated from Active Directory to speed up the process. At this point user receives an email using these details with the call reference and an embedded URL so they can track the call online
• Operative assesses impact and urgency and prioritises the call appropriately, with caller still on the line
• Operative assesses the details of the call and performs initial diagnostic and fault finding with the user. If the incident is within the Service Desk remit, Operative will then attempt to resolve using remote administration tools
• If the Operative requires longer too resolve the incident remotely, or the incident is related to a third party, data centre team or on-site support Operative will let the user drop off the line and then escalate accordingly. During this time, Operative continues to work on the call or chase the Vendor and updates the notes on the call with the progress. User receives emails every time the call is updated, and can also track the updates using the embedded URL
• Once the call is resolved the user is informed, check is made by the Operative and the user to confirm resolution, and then the call is closed. User receives a final email confirming the call has been closed
• Within two weeks of resolution, the user may receive a random follow up call from the CMS quality team to answer a short questionnaire relating to how the incident was handled. This is for quality purposes and the results of these surveys are fed back to our customers at the Monthly review meetings

Nominated representatives of our customers are also allocated access to the CMS web-portal with higher level access. This enables these representatives to see a snapshot of calls, be it for their site or across the entire business. They can quickly see if any calls are close to breaching, or are breaching, SLA and can then drill into the individual calls to check the progress of the incident.

Due to the skill levels and 1st & 2nd Line nature, the CMS 3rd line team who are based at our data centre in Manchester are involved in two main activities. The first is critical calls or calls of a highly technical nature, the second being patching, configuration changes and trend management.

The majority of customer incidents and requests reach the 3rd line team after being logged by the Service Desk and escalated to the team through the incident management software. Whilst this works well for most instances, CMS recognise there maybe be certain users who require direct access to the data centre team, such as development users or other IT staff. As such, CMS also provide dedicated phone and email support into the 3rd line team. These requests are logged in the incident management system in the same way as normal Service Desk calls, so can still be monitored through the web portal and reported on.