Aviation Service Desk Case Study: Scaling IT Support

CLIENT PROFILE

Founded in 2004, our client is the first and only global private aviation company - flying heads of state, corporate leaders, entrepreneurs, and private individuals to more than 1,900 airports in 187 countries. Its fleet consists of more than 100 wholly owned, ultra-long-range business jets that can fly charter and prepaid customers between any two points - easily connecting enterprises to growth markets. In 2018, the client formed a holding company and acquired an on-demand charter flight company and online flight booking platform, enabling it to serve the entire spectrum of business aviation customers. It maintains more than 2,000 crew members and on-land employees worldwide, with major operations in Malta and England.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

After acquiring the leading North American on-demand charter brand, the client needed to modernize and expand its IT support model to accommodate the new service and significantly larger volume of users. With a centralized platform that enabled on-demand customers to instantly book flights for anywhere at any time, 24/7 IT support was required to avoid flight delays.

Challenges included:

	Managing 24/7 support. Before the acquisition, the IT support schedule was predominantly geared toward Europe and Asia; now the client needed to provide full support for U.S. time zones. However, adding the proper 24x7 coverage and volume support in-house would be very costly – requiring the client to hire more than 11 agents in different time zones.
	Handling higher volumes. The number of users had just doubled after the acquisition.
	Improving the user experience. The client’s current IT support was stuck in firefighting mode, with few formal processes and minimal resources working a limited schedule. Without live agents to triage and troubleshoot issues after-hours, too many tickets required escalation to on-call, management-level resources.
	Standardizing IT first-contact support. Charter employees used a different method for contacting IT than the rest of the organization. There were also different tools for tracking and escalating issues. Standard operating procedures across both organizations were outdated or non-existent, without an IT best practices framework.
	Tracking key IT metrics. The client needed a reliable mechanism for tracking critical metrics like ticket volumes and top incident and request areas. Without it, the client struggled to accurately plan IT resources or proactively identify and address recurring issues.

SOLUTION

Auxis was hired as the client’s IT Global Help Desk Outsourcing partner, providing remote, 24x7, Level 1 first-contact support from its Nearshore Delivery Center in Costa Rica. Auxis replaced the client’s outdated, reactive approach with a modern High-Performance Service Desk, customizing a solution prepared to fully address existing and future end-user support challenges.

Standard processes and operating procedures were formalized and documented based on ITIL best practices. As a result, support processes became standardized across the entire organization - creating a scalable, service centric model with repeatable processes and clear escalation points that consistently delivered excellent service.

To ensure a smooth transition with minimal business disruption, Auxis migrated the client’s support operation to Costa Rica in two stages – starting with the parent operation and onboarding support for the charter acquisition in the second wave.

Once the service desk was running smoothly, Auxis began a similar transition process for the charter brand. Two months later, the Auxis service desk was seamlessly providing standardized Level 1 support for the entire organization.

RESULTS

Auxis successfully supported the client’s business growth with a best-in-class, standardized, scalable, and cost-effective Level 1 IT service desk.

Key benefits included:

40%+ Cost Savings

With a predictable per-ticket fee model, the client achieved over 40% cost savings, compared to hiring the eleven in-house resources that would have been required to cover the same volume around-the-clock.

98% Customer Satisfaction

The Auxis service desk maintains a considerably high average customer satisfaction score of 98% (4.9 on a 5.0 scale). End-user experiences were significantly improved by creating a highly skilled, customer service focused support team that could be contacted 24x7 by phone or email from anywhere in the world.

Increased Focus on Innovation

Auxis resources manage more than 15,000 inbound and outbound calls and more than 24,000 tickets every year – giving the client’s higher-level IT resources the bandwidth to focus on value-add activities like innovation initiatives that drive revenue growth.

The Addition of 24x7 Quality Phone Support

Auxis expanded the client’s channels for providing IT support by implementing a cloud-based Contact Center phone service integrated with the client’s IVR system. The selected phone system, Five9, brought key functionalities and service improvements, including:

• A customized company greeting and recording
• The ability for end-users to leave a voice mail or press a number to get a call back without losing their spot in the queue
• Call recording for quality assurance, training, evaluations, and investigations
• The option to create a one-question survey at the end of each call to measure end-user satisfaction
• Strong metrics and reporting of phone user calls and performance

Easy & Fast Scalability

Auxis implemented workforce management best practices that provided the flexibility to easily scale the IT support model up and down based on the client’s needs. Key improvements included:

• Project resource requirements designed to accommodate seasonal demand, as well as fluctuating demand at different times and days
• Better handling of ticket spikes by creating a process for assigning additional resources as needed.
• Documented IT governance procedures for incident, request, and escalation management.
• Documented operational procedures for all business and infrastructure applications, as well as end-user software and hardware.
• Defined, measured, and regularly reported KPIs (key performance indicators) for tracking the performance of the Level 1 team.
• A variable but predictable cost model for services, based on a per-ticket fee.

Pleased with the service desk’s success, the client is looking to expand their partnership with Auxis beyond Service Desk, including additional services in the areas of Network and Infrastructure Monitoring.