This leading global chemical and industrial gases company faced the inevitable challenge that to remain cost competitive in its global market space it needed to lower its operational costs.  They acknowledge that one obvious strategic opportunity for accomplishing this was by lowering its total annual IT support costs to its nearly 15,000 global end users without compromising end user productivity and contribution to corporate performance. Having applied more historical approaches including Service Desk consolidations, outsourcing and offshoring, they recognized that expected improvements in annual cost performance were going to require non-traditional thinking, and innovative solutions that could create lasting changes in its support model.

Due to a major over-run in labor costs, a global IT Outsourcer is unable to meet its financial objectives in the fifth year of a contract.  The Service Desk team provides 24x7 IT support for a customer base of approximately 17,000 employees via phone and email channels.  The team consists of 28 agents handled an average of 550 contacts per day spiking to as high as 850 with 94% of that volume received during business hours.  Individual agents were handling on average 18 contacts per day with call times exceeding 15 minutes.  Information was accessed from multiple locations with the primary knowledge base usage below 5% of the total incidents opened.