Improve First Call Resolution

Nova for Help Desk First Call Resolution

Nova delivers an integrated set of tools that make Office 365 support easier and more efficient, empowering you with sophisticated Reporting, Monitoring, and Delegation and Policy Control to improve First Call Resolution.

Increased visibility into the user’s environment ensures more granular control of admin activities, with a broad set of delegation-capable actions and proactive alerts to ensure Help Desk First Call Resolution is dynamic and decisive.

Nova gives you better data and better tools to help you improve both Customer Service resolution and Customer Experience (CX) metrics.

How to Increase First Contact/Call Resolution (FCR)

Quality of service delivered to end-users is highly dependent on how many calls the service desk can solve on first contact. It’s therefore not surprising that First Contact (or Call) Resolution is one of the most important operational CX metrics as it makes a significant contribution to customer satisfaction.

Level 1 service desk operators supporting Office 365 are presented with several obstacles to resolving service issues on first contact:

• Gaining visibility into the user’s environment requires logging into multiple different portals to gain access all to the relevant data. Depending on the case this can include Azure AD user data, license data, detailed usage data, and the Microsoft 365 unified audit log
• Access to most Office 365 administrative tools requires elevated rights which are not widely granted due to security concerns
• To isolate issues for an individual user, the service desk technician often needs to manually compare groups which can be time-consuming
• It is difficult to identify whether a problem has an internal cause or is related to a Microsoft incident or reduced service levels
• Users aren’t always reliable sources of information about their own environments. They may have multiple devices that behave differently, they travel to different locations, and they often are surprised by operational changes that affect their account and make them think something is broken
• Help desk operators have no visibility into the changes administrators make to users’ environments such as setting features, removing licenses, and or adding/removing group memberships
• For operational flexibility, every help desk operator has to have access to every tenant they might manage.

What service desk operators need to know to close the call first time includes data about the user account, actions that have been taken by the user, and actions that have been performed against the user account by IT.

Having this information to hand makes a significant difference to the number of incidents that can be resolved on first contact and will also decrease Average Handle Time (AHT – the average duration of a single transaction, from customer’s initiation through to the conclusion of the request) and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR, the average amount of time it takes to resolve a case)

Nova presents the help desk operator with the relevant data about a user to support timely service incident resolution.

• Data about the user account includes last password change, associated Intune devices, user group, and Team membership, etc.
• Examples of actions that have been taken by the user include sharing files with external users, Teams, and email activity.
• Actions recorded that have been performed against the user account include information on who last changed the user’s password, group membership changes, user, licenses added or removed, and any risky login attempts registered against the user.

Showing all this data in a unified format to the service desk operator speeds resolution by ending the typical ‘hide and seek‘ process of assessing the state of the user’s account.

Reducing Ticket Volume and Escalations via Delegation

The greatest possible savings comes from preventing tickets before they occur by enabling end-users to safely and securely take actions that prevent a service ticket from being generated in the first place.

Cost reduction is also achieved when the need to escalate a ticket to a higher level can be reduced – enabling front-line technicians to perform actions in Microsoft 365 that would have required action by Global admin role (GA) holders will significantly reduce overall helpdesk costs.

By using Nova’s Delegation and Policy Control (DPC) capabilities, tasks that previously required the elevated permissions of GA can be moved to service desk operators with less elevated permissions.

When users take delegated action through Nova, whether for a password reset or the creation of a Team, specialized employees are not required to perform the tasks. This frees up the time of more skilled support staff to perform more complex tasks by avoiding assigning them to tickets simply because the task requires GA permissions in a standard M365 environment.

This shift enables you to substantially improve the performance of each tier of the helpdesk and lower your operating costs by shifting simple tasks down a level. For some tasks, this shift can even include providing self-service access to business users who need them performed.

Service Incident Avoidance Through Service Monitoring

Nova also delivers early warning of potential service problems through service monitoring.  Help desk technicians can be notified of developing M365 service problems, such as service outages or performance slowdowns, so they can proactively analyze the problem, help affected users, and get the right internal or Microsoft troubleshooting resources involved earlier than would be possible without service monitoring.

This service makes use of public and private beacons for passive network inspection, tests using Microsoft-provided test APIs, and synthetic transactions that accurately mimic real operations. Automated alerting when performance or service quality thresholds are breached assists help desk operators in pinpointing the cause and location of service of the degradation before end-users are impacted.

Align the Service Desk to Your Organizational Structure 

Nova allows IT to build a policy structure that aligns with the organization, enabling the delegation of administrator capabilities by region, country, or any AD field. Users can be grouped into logical Organizational Units (OUs) and administrators can be assigned permissions to perform specific actions against those OUs. 

Supporting Multiple Tenants

For service providers, and enterprises with multiple tenants, Nova’s multi-tenant management provides flexible tools that make supporting multiple tenants far easier. The foundations for this superior management model are based on defining organizational hierarchy across and between tenants for management purposes.

Tenants can also be grouped together for reporting purposes by geography, brand, industry, operating entity.   As part of Nova’s suite of Office 365 Management capabilities multi-tenant management ensures:

• Administrative rights are at the correct level anywhere in the organization, across and between tenants
• Delegation with the right level of access at every level of the organization, from self-service for front-line workers to selected privileges for branch office/small office managers
• Elimination of multiple logins for central IT staff
• Microsoft Office 365 licenses can be managed effectively across the tenants, bringing license usage, spending, and adoption under control

Better Customer Service, Improved Metrics and Lower Operating Costs

Deploying the right technology to support customer service is a smart investment. The combination of providing service desk operators with more data about the user raising a service incident, the ability to delegate effectively and safely, and the provision of proactive service monitoring all contribute to better service and better metrics.

You can improve First Call Resolution rates while Average Handle Time and Mean Time to Resolution can be decreased. While the financial and reputational benefits of improvements in these metrics will vary from organization to organization the return will rapidly overtake the investment in value.

If you’re keen to boost your Help Desk First Call Resolution, contact our expert team of IT pros and we’ll show you the full capabilities of our advanced Office 365 management software.