The Challenge

Companies are driven to innovate continually, but how do you do this whilst ensuring that the wheels don’t fall off your ever accelerating bus? It is widely believed that in-house IT teams spend 70% of their time supporting existing systems and 30% delivering additional value through innovation and service improvement. The cost to their businesses is therefore not only the effort expended, but also the missed opportunities to differentiate your offerings from your competition.
    
The Solution

The answer lies focusing your in-house resources on developing new systems that drive business growth, whilst handing over the responsibility for ‘keeping the wheels turning’ on existing legacy systems to SoftNice who will deliver a fully supported application (either as a fully managed outsourced service, or as part of an ‘application tier only’ support service) delivered against a tight Service Level Agreement.

SoftNice’s Approach to Application Support

SoftNice has been developing and supporting bespoke applications for over a decade and therefore understands the challenges involved in taking on software from a third party source.

The approach in compasses the following key steps:

 1. Analyze

SoftNice Support Consultants will review the application from all available information (available documentation, source code walk-through, review of call logs). SoftNice will produce a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s) document for the SoftNice Support personnel, to assist with addressing common issues quickly. This will be a live document reviewed and updated continually throughout the life of the agreement

2. Define

SoftNice will work with the customer to clearly define the parameters of the support agreement; this will include issues such as:

» The Service Level Agreement
» The process flow for logging issues with SoftNice, the controls around release management and the escalation routes should problems occur

3. Record

SoftNice will agree with the customer an appropriate method to record performance against Service Levels and how and when performance will be reported.  Depending on the contract this may be via face-to-face meeting with a service delivery manager or on-line reports available via the SoftNice Extranet.

4. Pilot

The pilot period is the opportunity to test the agreed processes and procedures and to bed in the application support agreement.  As a result of this phase lessons learnt will be reviewed at a service review meeting and any actions required to improve the service will be agreed.

5. Improve

Once the application has moved from pilot to full support, the SoftNice support term are charged with continually reviewing the performance of the agreement and enhancing areas, such as FAQ’s, to increase the support teams ability to respond to and resolve issues quickly.