The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

Basildon District Council is a local council in south Essex, responsible for approximately 129,000 electoral residents in the areas around Basildon, Billericay and Wickford. The Council IT team provides services to approximately 1,000 users employed at 65 sites across the district.

At Basildon District Council, the service desk is responsible for responding to internal IT problems and incidents and undertaking any changes. Towards the end of last year, the Council conducted a service desk review as it wanted to begin moving towards ITIL, which allows businesses to achieve quality service and overcome difficulties associated with the growth of IT systems.

In addition, the chosen service desk tool needed to be easy to navigate, with a user-friendly interface and uncomplicated front end, to eliminate the need to retrain staff. However, back-end processing was also key for the Council to monitor service desk alerts and status.

Ricky Hughes, Senior Network Support Technician at Basildon District Council, said: "We have been considering ITIL for a little while but it’s very difficult to get into. We realised that by looking at the service desk area, this could potentially be our starting point. We selected FrontRange HEAT 9 because it gives us the ability to take the service desk forward in a more strategic manner."

Having looked at a number of systems, Basildon District Council selected FrontRange’s HEAT 9 as the only solution that met its business requirements. It provides the Council with the functionality to manage the service desk within the ITIL framework and the value, support and maintenance offered by FrontRange was superior to alternative solutions. "The roadmap for HEAT 9 was robust," explained Hughes. "In the current climate, we wanted to ensure we selected a company that was strong in the market and can withstand the downturn to deliver that roadmap. We’re confident FrontRange can take us through the next few years."

Having rolled out the solution through the IT department, the Council is expecting the service desk to be significantly more efficient. By using HEAT Self Service, users will be able to log incidents from their desktop, rather than queuing on the phone. Using the reporting and management tools, service desk staff will also be able to break queries down into specific needs and process queries more effectively. This should all help deliver better response times, enabling the Council to meet and exceed its service level targets.

Hughes continued: "We’ve already been able to see how FrontRange HEAT 9 can benefit other areas of the business and are rolling out the solution in the revenues and benefits department to help process their internal queries and our partner organisation, St George’s Community Housing will also be deploying HEAT 9. By using the solution across different departments of the Council and partner organisations, we have maximised the return on investment by sharing the initial outlay.

"In the future, we’re keen to move it further afield into other departments as we can see the advantages it can bring to the whole organisation. We’ve always been happy with the service we have received from FrontRange, which has on occasion been over and above anything we could have expected. As a result, we are considering additional FrontRange products, such as Discovery," said Hughes.

Steve Feeney, UK Sales Director at FrontRange Solutions says. "HEAT’s ability to log customer interactions quickly and efficiently will enable the Council to easily reach its service level targets. By using the reporting and management tools, it will also be able to provide better visibility to end users as well as enabling analysis of the data and proactive responses to any trends."

About FrontRange Solutions Inc.:
FrontRange develops software and solutions enabling organizations to deliver customer management, using enterprise-class service and support, sales & marketing and contact management technology with full voice-enablement. A focus on research, development and continuous product refinement has produced software solutions which deliver optimum return on investment, by improving employee productivity to achieve both better customer relations and improved profitability. FrontRange Customer Service Management is the only true multi-channel solution, including full contact center telephony (Voice) support.