Government Service Desk

See how Chime for Microsoft Lync/S4B has helped the government service desk.

Case Study: Government Service Desk

How Chime helps the Government

A government has a central IT support organization for all government employees. Before Chime, all government employees had to call in and often wait on hold before being able to talk with someone about their technical issue. Chime has allowed government employees to get connected with IT agents almost instantly.

"Our first-call resolution rate increased by 85%, and our issue resolution time dropped significantly, where issues that had been taking 24 hours to resolve are now being closed in under 5 minutes."
Director of Government IT Support

Problem

With more than 100,000 government employees, there was almost always a significant wait to receive IT support. Even for minor support issues, it was sometimes taking over 24 hours to receive any kind of help. The need for real-time collaboration was too great to keep the existing system.

The primary goals for a new system were to include:

  • Instant Messaging that allowed for concurrent conversations between agents and government employees
  • Integration with the existing Skype for Business infrastructure
  • Robust charting and reporting for management and oversight

Solution

Instant Chime for Lync/S4B has enabled the government IT agents to work on more than one issue at a time. This is a huge advantage over phone support, where the agent can only work with one user at a time. With queues in English, Spanish, and French, employees from offices around the world can get the help they need in the language they speak.

Questions could be submitted via the users’ Lync buddy lists or through an internal web portal. Service desk personnel were able to self-manage their availability to render assistance, with the confidence that Chime would automatically distribute in-bound requests evenly. They could also reply with canned responses from a central database to ensure consistent answers to common questions. Management gained clear insight into service desk operations, as all interactions were logged to a central database for internal auditing and/or external compliance reporting.

Deployment

Queues Agents Employees Languages Client Web Client SQL Server
6 150 > 100,000 English, Spanish, French Skype for Business 2016 Internal Web page, External web page via Chime Hub SQL Server Windows Server 2012

Web Client

Location: Inside organization's firewall
Shared via: Internal web page, external web page via Chime Hub

Security is a high priority and major concern for most companies. Exposing anything to the DMZ without precautions is a major security risk. By having Chime live inside the organization's firewall, the organization prevents any unwanted access to their environment. Chime Hub provides a cloud based service to quickly extend your Chime on-premise installation to support external websites and portals. You no longer need to deploy machines in a DMZ, proxy servers, or other complex server configurations – Chime Hub connects you quickly with external sites.

Enterprise IT Service Desk Architecture

Virtual Agent

Chime virtual agents perform automated tasks at specific points in the Chime session (chat session) lifecycle. This organization uses one virtual agents to send out emails to any employee that couldn't get connected with an agent. This Virtual Agent responds to sessions that have timed-out by sending two e-mails: a follow-up e-mail to the employee and a notification e-mail to a manger. More on this virtual agent can be found here:


More about Chime