Empact Keeps an Eye on the Help Desk

In a move designed to help enterprises, outsourcers and service providers better measure and track help desk operations, Empact Solutions yesterday announced the availability of EyeQ Operations.

Built upon Empact’s EyeQ architecture, which the New York, N.Y.-based company launched last September, EyeQ Operations is designed to capture data from industry leading service management systems such as Remedy and Peregrine.

By measuring the operational service delivery levels, EyeQ Operations is designed to identify where service quality is below or exceeds thresholds and standards. Information is made available through a Web-based dashboard. This information can be combined with operational performance indicators to show the status of the overall business and provide a framework for improving the operational efficiency of the customer care unit.

EyeQ Operations reports cover the following topics, according to Empact Solutions:

• Time to repair
• Time to respond
• Personnel performance by shift
• Multiple levels of severity
• Analysis across multiple business departments

When it comes to underperforming service levels, EyeQ Operations can pinpoint the specific problem by reporting on individual department performance levels such as response time and time to repair, according to Evan Sohn, Empact Solutions’s vice president, product management and marketing. EyeQ Operations can also report on which shift is delivering the most customer satisfaction.

Sohn also said that the software can provide insight into the efficiency of trouble tickets. “You can determine whether or not trouble tickets were closed appropriately.” Tickets closed for arbitrary reasons is a common problem with help desk workers, Sohn said. “Some reasons are just ‘I felt like it’.” EyeQ Operations is designed to dig for information to validate the closed trouble tickets by both looping the closed tickets back to the IT infrastructure or monitoring the trouble ticket escalation and closure process.

Sohn also said that for outsourcers and service providers, a third-party tool adds a sense of impartiality to monitoring service level agreements (SLAs).
“To prove customer satisfaction, enterprises have turned to third-party organizations that audit customers and report on their levels of satisfaction,” Sohn said.

According to Empact Solutions, EyeQ Operations allows users to accomplish the following:

• Assess how IT performance affects business service levels.
• Audit actual service quality against performance and monitoring data.
• Maximize IT utilization by determining help desk productivity and improve future service levels.
• Improve quality, speed and effectiveness of business operations.
• Align IT with the business, improving the return on investment (ROI) of IT.
• Focus IT resources on maintaining service for critical to quality business processes.
• See the consequences of IT problems on the business and can initiate tactical actions to mitigate any disruption to business service.
• Business process owners have access to operational metrics supporting decision-making.

To operate the service, Empact Solutions places EyeQ Agent, which is rack-mountable hardware, within an IT environments. The agent then sends data through a secure one-way communication to the EyeQ data center. Users then access the data through the Web-based dashboard.

Pricing for EyeQ Operations starts at $3,000 per month. The actual price is determined by the number of user IDs and devices monitored, Sohn said.

Empact Solutions began operations in March 2000 as a consultant to Fortune 1000 companies. It received $10 million in financing from
investors, including M/C Venture Partners. Sohn said the company has not yet determined whether future rounds of funding will be required.
He added that Empact Solutions will be announcing a deal with a major pharmaceutical company in June.

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