Case Study – Technical Support Team

The Customer – A technology hardware vendor

Key points:

Automated process with increased efficiency and high visibility

Alternative to expensive and long to deploy CRM process

An option for departmental manager to deploy a workflow management system without causing other departments to change.

The Team Mission – The technical support team is doing pre-sale support for Network Design, RFP response and Trials. 

The Need – although the company has one of the leading CRM systems, presale support request by the sales people is done through emails and then opened manually and entered into excel spread sheet (to build a process in the CRM will be expensive and will take long to implement). The Technical support manager then assigns the work to his team and monitors its progress manually   The sales person doesn’t have visibility of the progress with his request and has to ping the Technical Support Team by phone or email to verify progress with his request. The technical support manager wanted to introduce a monitoring and automation tool that will help him manage the presale assignments without having to force other departments or the IT into any change and all that at reasonable cost that doesn’t require board approval. With the blessing from the IT department Briefery went into work.

Briefery Solution –

The sales person (not a briefery user) sends an email with support request

The email automatically triggers a new workflow with the email title as the flow title and placed in station one – new assignment

A new document is automatically assigned to the flow with the following fields: Assigned to; Requested by; Priority; Due date; Status; comments 

Once a day the technical support manager reviews the new assignments and assigns each request to a technical support team member.

The technical support team member gets a notification that he got a new assignment

The technical support team member reviews the request and confirms – the flow automatically moves to work in progress station.    When the assignment is completed, the technical support member confirms again and the flow moves to completed.

If the assignment is overdue the manager gets notified.

The manager can look at any time at the stations and see the status of each assignment.

With one click, the manager sends an excel spread sheet to the salespeople with the updated status of their assignments.

The workflow has four more stations: Won, Won and ordered, Lost and Delayed.  The flow is routed to the relevant station according to the sales people reports for future statistics.

The Technical Support Manager Vision – is that sales people will eventually select to download the app as well and then will have real time notifications on the status of their assignments. They will also be able to correspond with the support team within the app on questions asked for a structured documentation of the assignment.  A later stage can be interfacing with the corporate CRM to automatically update customers’ records.