In January 2001, Troutman Sanders, a law firm, completed its merger with Virginia-based Mays & Valentine, which immediately added 200 users to its network. Both firms had in-house help desk services. The merger left Mays & Valentine's help desk in place as the first- and second-level call center and turned the Troutman Sanders help desk into an application support team. Over time, however, the firm realized that this setup did not provide an efficient and cost-effective support for its employees and in 2003 decided to outsource its help desk support to Intelliteach, which is also based in Atlanta.

Troutman Sanders CIO Barbara Kunkel explains that the firm's rationale for outsourcing its help desk was manifold. Troutman Sanders wanted to reduce the cost of help desk calls, as well as avoid future costs in training and maintaining dedicated staff and support applications. In addition, the firm wanted to improve the management and overall quality of the help desk services it provided to employees.

An outsourced help desk offered the firm increased availability and scalability in help desk operations, while gaining access to a team of technicians with superior skill sets to anything the firm itself could put together, an important consideration as the firm continued to grow in size and expand into international markets. "We wanted 24-7-365 coverage so that our staff in London and Hong Kong would have access to the same quality of service as that in Atlanta or New York," Kunkel says.

Troutman Sanders gauged the success of its outsourced help desk using five key standards to judge performance and ensure that outsourced services would meet the firm's needs:

       1. measurable objectives set up in the Service Level Agreement that focused on both current and long-term goals;
       2. success criteria determined by reviewing in-house operations and using the results as a baseline to assess the outsourced work; the review included internal costs, service performance levels, and the ability to manage the outsourced help desk with same level of detail as the in-house service;
       3. alternative service options, each of which were analyzed objectively;
       4. identification of potential business, financial, technology, process, and human resources risks in the outsourced help desk model; and
       5. the preparation required to manage the transition to the outsourced service, including effective communication and implementation processes.

"We attribute the success of our help desk outsourcing model to our overall approach in the initial decision-making process and ongoing management of the relationship with the selected vendor," Kunkel says, adding that these criteria ultimately led to the firm choosing Intelliteach over competing solutions.

For example, Kunkel notes that the importance of Intelliteach's high-availability, global coverage goes beyond 24-7-365 coverage. "When we brought on the Shanghai office at the end of 2006, [we noticed] kind of a cultural breakdown in understanding certain things. They prefer e-mail [to telephone], and Intelliteach will send a response within 15 minutes of an e-mail," Kunkel says, adding that this benchmark is spelled out in the firm's SLA with Intelliteach.

Measurable results

Troutman Sanders SLA with Intelliteach requires the vendor, at a minimum, to resolve 90 percent of incoming calls. Intelliteach averages about a 95 percent success rate, Kunkel notes. "This calculation excludes calls that we predetermined would be immediately escalated to us. For example, if somebody calls the help desk needing a new printer toner cartridge, it has to be done on-site," Kunkel says. "But most vendors won't commit to the statistics I'm giving you."

Kunkel suspects that most clients do not achieve such a high success rate. "But Intelliteach has been working for us for so many years that they know our operations," she says. "They have assigned a great group of people to work with us during our core business hours, and they just know us."

Intelliteach's understanding of Troutman Sanders' business has translated into customer satisfaction. Kunkel's 2009 data shows that of the 20 percent of Troutman Sanders' employees who decided to take a follow-up survey, between 93 and 95 percent rated their service as excellent overall. "You think typically that the ones responding to the surveys have some kind of gripe, and they know [the survey] is for our internal purposes, but that hasn't been the case," Kunkel says. "Of the five or so percent who rate their service as good, average, or below average, they are generally very specific with their complaints. We can then take action, which is really cool."

Moreover, Troutman Sanders is spending less on its help desk services with Intelliteach than comparable Am Law 100 firms. "I [am part of] this benchmark group, and we're pretty good about sharing information. In 2009, 10 other Am Law 100 firms gave me benchmark data [that showed] the cost of their help desk operations, whether in-house or outsourced. I took my data, compared it to this average, and saw we're spending 24 percent less on our annual help desk operations than the average of those 10 firms," Kunkel says.

Undestanding how law firms work

Kunkel feels especially comfortable with Intelliteach because its founders, including CEO Lance Waagner, are former IT directors of major law firms, and the company provides help desk services exclusively to law firms. "You feel that you're dealing with someone who understands my world and what my problems are," Kunkel says, adding that she feels comfortable handing over this portion of her business to Intelliteach so that her department can focus on serving the firm's attorneys and clients in more strategic ways.

Kunkel points out that although she joined Troutman Sanders in 2006, three years after the migration, she was already familiar with Intelliteach because her previous law firm had outsourced its evening help desk coverage to the company. And she felt that Intelliteach could be even more effective for the firm than it already was. "I told Lance [Waagner] that we can strengthen this partnership and improve our statistics and measurements if one of his team leaders came to our office for a full day every week and spent [it] with our engineers," Kunkel says. "I said we could build it into our agreement, and Lance said, 'Let's give it a try. We don't have to put any additional costs.'"

Kunkel set up Intelliteach's employee with his own office, and once a week the employee shadowed members of Kunkel's IT staff, talking with them and watching as they handled various problems. This employee then gave his team updates on Troutman Sanders and ultimately offered the firm suggestions and adjusted Intelliteach's services to satisfy Troutman Sanders' unique needs.

Increasing IT IQ

Kunkel gives IQTrack, Intelliteach's web-based support and reporting application especially high marks. "IQTrack can be set up to analyze your calls, categorize them, define how you want to categorize them, fine-tune the escalation process, and tweak these at any time. We can even put specific notes on attorneys who might get agitated if you misspell or mispronounce their names," Kunkel says. "If an attorney is working on a new project, we can generate a quick report [telling us] all the times he's used our help desk services. You got the whole history like that."

IQTrack's reporting capabilities improves Troutman Sanders' overall workflow because of the knowledge base it creates. "Through IQTrack and Intelliteach, we have a call history that dates back to 2003, so for example, when we migrated everyone to Office 2007, we can look back at our previous desktop conversion to see the call volume during that migration, just by pulling up a report," says Kunkel. "Then you can categorize [the current migration] to a new category, so that all incoming products and calls can be tracked through this category, and that becomes a nice metric for success with future projects. It's just awesome."

Source: law.com