You just got home from work to find that there’s an issue with your internet. You did what you can through the app but ultimately ended up calling your provider. On hold, you decide to start preparing dinner. Dinner is done, but you’re still on hold. You finish eating, but you’re still on hold. You do your dishes and clean the kitchen. It’s been over 90 minutes. You’re still on hold. The hold music has been burned into your head.
The nightmare of being put on hold for an eternity is all too real for modern consumers, especially as the world continues to embrace automation and AI voice bots. As these technologies are adopted and folded into support service journeys, many are left wondering if they’ll ever break the voice prompt loop and speak to a real human again.
In a recent interview, however, Ed Meier, the Director of Support Operations at Impact, sheds light on how his team implemented these technologies with responsible automation in mind to significantly shrink the time to answer of Impact’s support desk – ultimately connecting clients in need of support to human beings a staggering 1200% faster.
Realizing Growing Pains
Before getting into the impressive improvements to support desk metrics, I wanted to get a sense of where things were previously, which meant taking a trip back to 2019, when the Unified Support Operations (USO) team began tracking some of these metrics, including time to answer.
In fact, defining and tracking metrics was one of the fundamental building blocks to successfully improving support services so drastically, and something that Ed Meier learned from his mentor, Rick Ray, early on in his career.
After starting to track metrics like time to answer in 2019, the USO saw fairly standard growth year –after year, with time to answer increasing by around 5 seconds or so. But by late 2022, things started getting out of hand.
Rather than the typical growth of 5-7 seconds, the average time to answer ballooned from a little under 4 minutes to over 6.5 minutes on average by the end of Q3 2022, this also started to influence the support desk rating, which dipped to under 6.7/10. Curious, I asked how our time to answer compared to other managed service providers. And Meier’s explanation hinted at Impact’s “it” factor, the unique DNA that defines this company.
“So, a typical service desk in an MSP organization like Impact is usually around 4-5 minutes average answer time, so that’s not atypical from an industry average experience, but Impact isn’t your average company, right? We’re not looking to be the average provider out there. We sell a premium service, we hire premium people, and that means we need to provide a premium level of support,” said Meier.
It was obvious that change was needed, and the wheels of continual improvement were thrown into high-gear, bringing us back to defining, measuring, and tracking key metrics.
Meier told me, “Any metric we could think of, we started measuring and we put it onto a board which we’d review on a daily basis as a management team, and ask ourselves, ‘are we making the right decision?’”
But it wasn’t just about making changes to the processes and systems in place, the team needed a way to see if the changes made actually worked.
“One important aspect of this process was that we decided that any change we made had to stay in production for at least two weeks. The reason being we didn’t want an emergency situation one week to influence our ability to see the true impact of any one change.”
It was here that Meier’s humility was on full display as he went on to credit other members of Impact leadership, like Frank DeGeorge and Patrick Layton, for their help with this entire project from analysis and troubleshooting to change management and general mentorship.
Investing in People and Processes
After realizing that the time to answer and support service rating metrics were reaching unacceptable territories, and identifying where those numbers would be in an ideal world, the team needed to figure out how to bridge the current reality with their ideal future.
Surprisingly, this started with a move that might seem slightly counter-intuitive; establishing a new team, the solutions team, within the USO department that initially reduced the number of support staff available to handle calls and tickets. Despite how out of pocket this sounded at the time, and Ed was fully aware of that, he reveres his team for taking this journey with him in stride.
“The ultimate thank you goes out to the team because they're the ones that stepped up when the chips were down, when everything looked like there was nothing they could do. And then here I came out with this crazy idea... and not only did they trust us, they doubled down and put every effort they had into every single ask we made - and the results speak for themselves.”
This is where the momentum truly shifted. The solutions team was designed to put their entire focus on automation, documentation, and training. For example, the solutions team would look at support tickets that had been escalated to advanced support personnel to create preventative measures within the process that would make escalating a similar ticket in the future unnecessary.
With their focus on automation, the team was able to eventually save around three minutes per incident, which translates to over 900 total hours saved up to this point. Moving forward, the solutions team is hoping to save upwards of 20 minutes per incident, which would equate to thousands and thousands of hours saved.
The solutions team also took on the responsibility of building out documentation and adding it to an internal library that gave the support team an easy-to-navigate database of reference material for different technical situations or issues they might encounter with a client or on a ticket – streamlining support delivery.
Since being established, the solutions team has grown the documentation exponentially, adding 300 articles throughout the course of 2023 and an additional 600+ in 2024 so far.
On top of building out the newly established solutions team, another major tactic that proved successful in this journey was investing in employee advancement through promotions and project ownership, underscoring Meier’s take on professional advancement in general.
“One of the difficult parts of running the service desk is that our goal is that no employee stays here for longer than three years.”
Continually investing in his team and their professional advancement isn’t just a tactic for Meier and the USO – it's an ideology. One that isn’t just on display in the way they view promotions but is also highlighted by the fact that, despite all the chaos and the real-time changes being implemented, Meier committed to maintaining the tradition of regular summer cookouts for the team as a way to blow off steam, bond, and build morale during such a trying period.
“So, amidst all of the craziness that's going on, we still wanted to plan that [the summer cookouts] out because it's an opportunity for people to take a step back and breathe. And while this might seem like it would have been a low priority with everything else, I worked with the leadership team to make it happen because I think the culture is so critical to what we do, I wanted to maintain that.”
The Results
When things were at their worst in late 2022:
- Average time to answer was over 6.5 minutes, meaning some clients were on hold for over a full half hour, and emails went unanswered for nearly 12 hours on average.
- The support desk rating dipped all the way to 6.68/10
- Escalation hit a massive peak of 21% on 162,000 tickets
- The documentation knowledge base held a measly 120 articles
Where Meier has things now, after establishing the solutions team, investing in employee advancement, and adopting new technologies, however, paints a much prettier picture:
- Average time to answer is down 1200% in 2024 to 28.7 seconds
- The support desk rating sky-rocketed to a stellar 9.02/10
- Escalation has dropped down to 8.8% on 175,000 tickets
- The documentation library now contains over 1000 articles with 300+ added in 2023 and 600+ created in 2024 so far.
The results here truly do speak for themselves and are a testament to the hard work and creative problem solving embodied by the entire USO here at Impact. Although, I think what’s most impressive is what Meier shared with me next as he explained his take on the results and what drives him.
“Certainly, the time to answer metric is probably the most impressive from that standpoint, but the one I'm most proud of is the one that talks about what our customers think of the service desk. Because that's not just time to answer. It’s about how they’re receiving support, how easy it is to work with Impact, and how valuable they think the support we’re providing is.”
What’s Next
While the USO is in a much better place today than it was at the end of 2022, this whole journey only emphasized the importance of continual improvement in Meier’s eyes – who is now looking at how they can evolve and elevate our support services even further.
“Our first and foremost goal is to exceed the rate of growth of Impact. So, from efficiency to helping our team be more knowledgeable and capable of handling more complex issues to ensuring that their satisfaction remains at that high level, those are really our focuses for this year.” Meier told me.
He then went on to say, “So then in 2025 we build a little bit off of 2024 but focus on ways that we can make it 10x what it was the year prior. Then in 2026, we focus a little bit less on preparation because we will have already done that. But, it’s important to note that the closer you get to zero with a metric like time to answer, it gets wildly more difficult to maintain. But that’s sort of where we’re headed.”
Key Takeaway: Trust the Process and Your People
Under Meier and the rest of the Impact leadership team, the future of the USO looks brighter every day as they work with their teams to adopt and implement technologies that don’t just streamline processes but make it easier for the people behind our support services to help the people representing our clients.
According to Meier, the majority of his success in this undertaking came from trusting the processes in place and the people around him.
“My statement to you is to believe in the process. The process has been proven time and time again. The reason we grow at the rate we do is because Impact has built this idea of ‘let's focus on a couple key aspects and change everything else continuously.’ And if you follow that process and trust your people, it just works so well.”
