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.

They had attempted earlier internally-managed initiatives to provide selected information or services to end users from multiple corporate intranet sites, with the anticipation that call volumes to their global helpdesk centers would shrink, allowing for reductions in labor costs as volumes declined.  But they failed to achieve end user acceptance and adoption of the service, and saw no appreciable reductions in call volumes.

The resources of ii2P implemented a global, turnkey end user self service capability that over two years literally transformed the end user support model for this company.  Ii2P’s approach to success was to apply not only technology, but more importantly a committed focus on content management to ensure self service content was always relevant to what was occurring in the environment, as well as highly effective to allow end users to resolve issues without having to engage the Service Desk.  In parallel, ii2P provided ongoing marketing and communications efforts to promote usage and success of the re-invigorated self service offering.

Clearly aided by exceptional executive management endorsement and sponsorship, this company achieved its objective of transforming its end user support model.  After two years, end user self service transactions exceeded inbound contacts to the service desk!  One of their regional helpdesk operations was able to reduce its staffing from 25+ agents to 8!  As end users have come to prefer the self service experience over calling to the helpdesk, the self service portal continues to evolve, incorporating additional elements in direct response to end user demand.