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With Numara™ FootPrints®, RedDot Solutions transitioned its help desk to a web-based integrated service desk, empowering customers with online self-service to speed problem resolution and reduce agent workload. By centralizing requests online, technicians can more easily track, review, and respond to 200+ issues each day. And, they use Numara FootPrints to easily share bugs and enhancement requests with the support and development teams at RedDot's world headquarters in Germany.
Business Problem For product support, RedDot Solutions’ customers call or email the New York-based technical support team. Previously, technicians used email to communicate with one another –but had no centralized system in place to organize, track, and manage the 70-200 requests coming in each day. As a result, the team could not effectively track issues, share information, communicate status to customers, or address requests in a timely fashion. Support was stalled by delays and lost issues. The process in place also made it difficult to communicate critical issues to RedDot Solutions’ main support and development teams in Germany, who were constantly working on upgrades and enhancements to the RedDot products. The Numara FootPrints Solution @ RedDot Solutions RedDot Solutions installed Numara FootPrints quickly and easily, implementing it to all customers and employees in less than two weeks. Numara FootPrints was set up on a hosted Linux server using a MySQL™ database from MySQL AB. The system is integrated with RedDot Solutions’ corporate extranet, which users access via any browser. Two projects were set up in Numara FootPrints to accommodate customer support requests, each with a database of solutions for customers to access. A separate project with its own knowledge base was established for internal use so technicians can track bugs and other problems, and communicate them directly to the development and support teams in Germany. With Numara FootPrints’ extensive customization capabilities, RedDot Solutions created a look and feel for the system that matches its corporate extranet.
"Customization was an attractive feature," commented Oliver Ziegler, Director of Technical Services and Support for RedDot Solutions. "We created a multitude of custom fields to tailor the Numara FootPrints tickets, so problem entry and tracking is quick and easy for our customers. We also developed a separate set of fields for our internal project, so the process is just as simple for our support consultants. Using a series of drop-down menus, the support team can assign a range of values to each ticket, designating status (open, testing, pending, and closed), priority level (1-10), problem type (question, bug, and feature request), and severity (high, medium, and low impact). And customers can easily fill in tickets by selecting from a list of RedDot products, status (open, in progress, responded, and closed), and priority (1-5)."
Ten internal technical support consultants at RedDot Solutions currently use Numara FootPrints, along with 1,200 active users at its customer and partner sites throughout North America –approximately 2,500-3,000 external users overall. Customers have four points of contact for support:log on for online self-help, send requests via email, LiveSupport via chat, or call the support hotline. They are encouraged first to access the system themselves to check account information and search the solutions database for fast answers to common problems. If further assistance is required, they enter tickets directly using Numara FootPrints’ web-based interface. They can also email, chat, or call members of the support team, who then enter the tickets into Numara FootPrints.Once a ticket is in Numara FootPrints, RedDot Solutions’ main support team is automatically notified via email, and immediately assigns it to the appropriate person. Using Numara FootPrints’ built-in escalation capabilities on a daily basis, RedDot Solutions ensures that tickets don’t age for more than four hours without a response, and for a maximum of two days without a solution. The average time to resolve issues is only one day.
“The email notification is so critical to our operation,especially to make our customers feel that their needs are being addressed. Customers love the response system. They get an email confirmation as soon as they submit a ticket, so they can make any necessary changes to their request. Meanwhile, our technicians are instantly alerted so they can start working on the issue, ”said Ziegler.“ Our customers are continuously alerted with the latest status of their request –so our technicians are encouraged to work faster and more effectively, and our communication with our customers has significantly improved.”
RedDot Solutions also uses Numara FootPrints’ email alerts for its internal project, automatically updating its German counterparts about new bugs and other product issues. The company also uses Numara FootPrints’ advanced built-in and custom reporting capabilities to easily generate monthly reports to RedDot Solutions’ President in the US and CEO in Germany, and to continuously track daily activity levels, response times, and more.
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