For a service desk to delight both company leadership and users while reducing costs, the infrastructure and support staff need to be empowered and enabled to maximize effectiveness while streamlining efforts. With SteelCentral Aternity from Riverbed—the end-user experience monitoring solution built to be a foundation for best practices—the service desks that you provide and support will be better equipped to meet service level agreements. And, with the right configuration of Riverbed solutions, your service desks can become equipped to solve issues proactively before customers are impacted.
Drive efficiency with Aternity
People call the service desk when they have a problem that’s keeping them from accomplishing a task. For employees, service desk calls represent lost productivity, resulting in both employee downtime losses and incurred trouble ticket resolution expenses. More than 50% of the cost of service desk tickets is due to staff salary and benefits. The longer it takes to resolve customer issues, the greater the impact, including the potential loss of customers and reputation. Due to critical need for expedited resolution, trouble tickets are frequently escalated to a more technical team for resolution, which can further increase costs. Often, escalations require end-users or service desk staff to repeat information, including observed issues and steps taken, resulting in frustration for the service desk team members and potential inconsistency and miscommunication between teams.
SteelCentral Aternity provides a foundation for validating end-user issues remotely and proactively, rapidly diagnosing the cause, and providing valuable information that eliminates the need for the user or first-call response staff to repeat the problem upon escalation. With the ability to isolate the cause of delay to the client device, the network, or the server, Aternity minimizes the need for additional research by Tier II and Tier III support. The service desk is able to provide detailed analysis of the problem and its cause, allowing for escalation support to rapidly solve the problem. Through these efficiencies, partners providing service-desk-as-a-service can handle more transactions with fewer support desk staff, providing the potential to take on bigger accounts and drive a more profitable business.
Boost service desk quality for a superior user experience
Aternity monitors IT from the point of consumption—the end-user’s device—so it can alert your service desk agents of potential issues before they become a source of frustration for the end-user. With the proactive nature of Aternity, your service desk agents can escalate or fix issues before they lead to downtime.
For partners interested in providing service desk capabilities, the benefit of “proactive tickets” is a compelling differentiator for Aternity over competing monitoring solutions, and it makes Aternity a natural foundation for providing superior service desk quality. A service provider that is proactive brings better value and keeps customer systems running at optimal effectiveness. With reduced downtime and decreased customer complaints, you increase the likelihood of retaining your clients long term while validating the value of your service vs. lower-cost service providers.
Additionally, when integrated with the SteelCentral portfolio, the end-user experience monitoring provided by Riverbed can isolate the source of delay to a client device, network or server, delivering accurate troubleshooting information to help isolate the cause. This complete solution can be offered as a best-practices platform that can be used by your service desk staff to avoid unnecessary handoffs. By empowering your first-line service desk agents to properly diagnose the functional area of an issue, they can potentially provide a resolution themselves, or contact the proper escalation support team the first time, reducing time to resolution and cost incurred by both your company and your customer.
Avoid handoffs and stop the blame game
With Aternity’s ability to accurately identify the source of an issue, the service desk is able to identify exactly which team is required to provide a resolution. The accuracy provided in troubleshooting eliminates the round-robin style blame handoff by teams while narrowing the search for root cause. Not only does Aternity help speed time to resolution, but the resulting process for ticket resolution becomes less stressful, less costly, and more productive. Your service technicians are then free to handle more customers, allowing you to expand your services and drive more revenue with fewer technicians. Additionally, your organization will be viewed as a trusted and knowledgeable asset that helps simplify processes to keep customer sites running at optimum performance.
Aternity is the perfect foundation for partners
While enterprise customers might think that a low-cost service desk is preferable, a partner that leads with Aternity can easily demonstrate the long-term, cost saving benefits of providing the efficiency and quality of a solid monitoring foundation. Additionally, Aternity helps partners drive strategic change for businesses that are ready to digitally transform. From the service desk capabilities and beyond, Aternity helps service providers deliver powerful metrics to customers demonstrating the valuable improvement to end-user experience through cloud migrations, Windows 10 upgrades and more.
By instrumenting your customers devices with Aternity, service providers can demonstrate valuable proof points throughout transformation initiatives. The data and analytics provided by Aternity allow partners to benchmark data center and application performance prior to cloud or OS migration, and then show stakeholders definitive proof of service levels and service delivery after migration. With these metrics, partners can justify the cost of migration services, which can lead to extended desktop service offerings beyond the initial migration, including total infrastructure monitoring and support, into and beyond the cloud.
Watch this short video to see how Aternity provides valuable proof of end-user experience improvement after Windows 10 migration to help partners secure long-term relationships with migration customers.
Try Aternity risk-free
When you register to try SteelCentral Aternity for free, you’ll have access to the complete product. Embrace the advantages of Aternity and monitor the end-user experience of every local, cloud or mobile app in your portfolio, running on any physical, virtual or mobile device in your infrastructure. Or, use your free trial to prove the value of Aternity for a customer.
Register for a free trial today, and start realizing the difference Aternity makes to the end-user experience.
Want to learn more?
Sign up for the Aternity webinar and join us April 24th for an in-depth look at how SteelCentral Aternity can help you differentiate your offerings with the most comprehensive end-user experience monitoring on the market.