Increased Annual Savings With Dispatch Reduction

A Fortune 500 computer hardware and technology company.

Problem

In today’s digital world, the internet is a popular platform for customers to raise and escalate customer support issues. For technical support queries, the internet often leads to quick escalation and slow resolution. As a result, many companies are plagued by long service request queues and a high volume of dispatch orders. For one of our clients, a fortune 500 computer hardware and technology company, the situation was similar. While total number of requests were down, the support team struggled to adequately manage the increasing number of dispatches. On average, 46.36% of 31,000 monthly service requests in their warranty queue ended as dispatches; and each dispatch entailed $125 in cost for our client. Their goal was to reduce dispatch rate to 40%.

Solution

Sutherland started with identifying trends in dispatch orders by different type and quantum of cost impact. Additionally, Sutherland leveraged its analytics expertise to assess dispatch reduction opportunities in the following ways:

We conducted Focused Group Discussions to gather inputs from the consultants, SMEs and team managers on issues leading to high dispatches and prioritizing improvement areas; and we identified opportunities for dispatch reduction.
We performed Data Scrubbing to assess volume of machine types, call drivers and KB articles that contribute to inaccurate dispatches in order to identify scope for improvement; and found that 12% of KB articles were leading to inaccurate dispatches.
We performed Knowledge Base Scrubbing to realize that 36% of dispatch issues can be addressed through Agent Tech Skill Upgrade or a Tier 2 support.

From there, Sutherland actioned several initiatives aimed at dispatch reduction:

Increased frequency of Knowledge Base article updates
Deployed a unified chat war room, which allowed agents to chat with SMEs and team managers on the go; and not end a service request as a dispatch if resolution was still possible
Proactively trained agents with high dispatch levels to allow addressing of issues (knowledge & support) which were leading to inaccurate dispatches.