Effective steps from the first minute - This is Application Service Desk at evosoft

A support team can be truly effective if it responds quickly and appropriately to the needs and potential problems. But it is not enough to know a few key words – it’s needed to understand how the systems work, sense its impact and respect the customers.

As an evosoft ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) project, the Application Service Desk (ASD) serves nearly 30,000 engineers, software developers, testers and various project staffs around the world with daily L1 and L1.5 technical support.

For them, the ASD team offers support (for Azure DevOps Server and Services, Privileged Access Management, ClearCase, Polarion, Artifactory and others) not within days or even hours from the moment they reported the case, but the newly created tickets are assigned to an agent on standby in minutes, thus the necessary processes can be launched immedately. Examples for daily incidents: resolutions of access errors, permission management (about existing settings or new structures), consulting, or execution of project management requests.

While time is not just money, it is also a value: every customer has a right to expect a fast, fair and empathetic approach from the service they have entrusted with their tasks.

To provide solutions as quickly as possible, ASD uses, improves and automates its own knowledge base. This consists hundreds of regularly maintained and professionally checked work instructions, updated by the team to ensure that the customer is provided with up-to-date solutions immediately. In this context, immediate means that if a customer or a higher level (L2, L3) team requests a change to a process, it can be implemented within an hour in an emergency situation, and the support team is able to continue the work flexibly in the productive environment without any issues.

As you can see, it has a highly prominent role for the Application Service Desk not only to have the classical task preparation and forwarding function, but also to take over specific tasks from the L2 and even L3 support teams. In this context, the ASD is responsible for a number of processes, like requests for new project entries or even providing solutions for technical issues with the requirement for intermediate technical knowledge. So, if the team has the ability and potential to do something by itself, it will do that without external dependencies or losing time.

Obviously, for the customers it is also important to be able to track the work carried out, this is why every single step of the ASD's work is thoroughly documented. Each case received is accompanied by an extensive back-up list of information, which is not only a reliable source for control and audit purposes, but can also serve as useful reference for daily issues, while ensuring a loss-free flow of information between the support agents.

The goal of the ITIL-based team is clear: to reduce the burden on L2/L3 teams and speed up the work, thereby increasing customer satisfaction. Of course, the first and second steps may happen before the users are aware of them: using various monitoring systems, the corresponding higher level teams can be alerted by ASD before users have experienced any serious disruptions in their work - and therefore they will not even experience them later.

In order to maintain the quality of service, the team explicitly strives for process optimisation, using a variety of technologies: whether cloud-based automation (connecting ticket system to Microsoft Teams, automated reporting of internal documentation) or Active Directory-based scripting (to control AD-accounts and device permissions, check network settings).

To ensure that ASD staff is able to utilize the most useful applications routinely, they also receive continuous trainings in organised way, whether through in-house training videos or training sessions organised by L2/L3 teams. This is why Application Service Desk offers unique solutions for those who are looking for a flexible, verifiable and ultimately reliable partner to support their project or service.