Step 7: Assess your support
It follows that if your staff are now dealing with end users and not just the IT manager, they are likely to get many more support requests. Stepping up to UC might mean beefing up the help desk and ticketing systems to service customers, handle feature or change requests.
“You’re handling potentially a lot more small and niggly requests,” Avnet’s Friend says. “It’s not as simple as ‘can you open up this port on the firewall’.”
Sometimes troubleshooting will mean initiating a short consulting session to identify the problem and find a solution.
“We had one this morning where a guy came up and said ‘my forwarding is not working’,” Friend says. The employee wanted calls to his mobile phone to ring on his desk phone simultaneously, a common UC feature.
However, he also wanted to forward all his calls to someone else – a completely contradictory request. The solution was to sit down and work out the business process the employee wanted to achieve and then decide the simplest way to program it.
When a support ticket comes through for a handset change, it almost always requires talking to the end user to figure out what they’re talking about, Friend says, which requires more effort. “The advantage is that you have a deeper relationship with your customer so you can sell them a much wider range of products and services.”
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