Modernising and scaling customer support operations

Kuwait Telecommunications Company has begun its IT transformation journey with ManageEngine through the implementation of IT Service Management solution, ServiceDesk Plus, achieving 400% reduction in customer response time, and has scaled with other offerings including OpManager, Application Manager and Analytics Plus.

This is an achievement for Kuwait Telecommunications Company, in its commitment to provide exceptional service to its customer base of 2.4+ million.

Dealing with sensitive customer information and ensuring data security and compliance was paramount, and meeting these requirements without disrupting operations was a continuous challenge.

Prior to this deployment, Kuwait Telecommunications Company’s IT support team relied on manual IT operations for tracking and managing support requests from the customers’ end.

Implementation of ManageEngine’s IT Service Management solution has proven to be instrumental in achieving a fivefold increase in response time and empowered the company with visibility.

The implementation has been a game-changer at Kuwait Telecommunications Company, enhancing workload visibility and reducing turnaround time and issue resolution for end users.

Over 90% of the customer issues were resolved within specified SLAs in the past year.

What are the pain points in IT service operations?

Cost management

Allocating the necessary budget for IT infrastructure can be a significant hurdle for organisations. Companies struggle to strike a balance between investing in robust IT infrastructure and managing their budgets effectively. This is especially critical for a customer support department as they rely heavily on technology to deliver efficient and responsive services.

Aligning IT with business

One of the perennial challenges has been ensuring that the IT infrastructure aligns with the overarching business objectives. This means having an infrastructure that can adapt to changing customer needs and market dynamics.

Compliance and security

In the realm of customer support, data security and compliance are paramount. Many organisations deal with sensitive customer information, and ensuring it’s protected and compliant with relevant regulations is a top priority. Meeting these requirements without disrupting operations is a continuous challenge.

Scalability and flexibility

The customer support landscape is ever-changing, and IT infrastructure needs to be flexible and scalable to accommodate growing volumes of customer interactions. Therefore, IT organisations need the ability to expand our resources and systems seamlessly.

Data management

Managing and integrating data across various systems and applications is an ongoing technological challenge. Companies rely on integrated IT Service Management solutions to streamline their workflows and deliver seamless customer service. Ensuring that data is accurate, available, and accessible in real-time is crucial.

Technology adoption

Keeping up with the latest technology trends and incorporating them into a company’s IT infrastructure can be complex. Whether it is adopting AI-driven chatbots or integrating new communication channels, the challenge lies in ensuring that new technologies enhance their support services without causing disruption.

Disaster recovery

Downtime in customer support operations can be detrimental. Implementing robust disaster recovery and redundancy solutions is essential to maintain high availability.

Kuwait Telecommunications Company, a leading telecom operator in Kuwait, has announced successful transformation of its customer support operations, resulting in 400% reduction in customer response time. The telecom company could bring in this major transformation with the integration and deployment of an IT Service Management solution from enterprise IT management company, ManageEngine.

This is an achievement for Kuwait Telecommunications Company, in its commitment to provide exceptional service to its growing customer base of more than 2.4 million.

Kuwait Telecommunications Company started its journey with ManageEngine through the implementation of IT Service Management solution, ServiceDesk Plus, before venturing into other offerings such as OpManager, Application Manager and Analytics Plus.

Legacy operations and pain points

With the significant influx of customer support requests, and with manual IT operations, Kuwait Telecommunications company was struggling to address customer concerns. The company recognised the need for a cutting-edge solution to expedite response time and enhance operational efficiency.

“One of the perennial challenges for us is to ensure the IT infrastructure keeps up with the demands of the telecommunication market, as the technology used is always changing. For the customer support team, this means having an IT infrastructure that can adapt to changing customer needs and market dynamics,” said Saud Al Akili, Head of Customer Support at Kuwait Telecommunications Company.

Dealing with sensitive customer information and ensuring data security and compliance was paramount, and meeting these requirements without disrupting operations was a continuous challenge.

Prior to this deployment, Kuwait Telecommunications Company’s IT support team relied on manual IT operations for tracking and managing support requests from the customers’ end. This led to disorganised and inefficient processes, making it challenging to prioritise and resolve issues in a timely manner.

As the organisation grew, it became more important for an effective IT Service Management system to be put in place to cater to the delivery of services more effectively and with less downtime.

Selecting an IT Service Management solution

After evaluating various solutions, Kuwait Telecommunications Company selected ServiceDesk Plus based on the solution’s ability to effectively streamline workflows and deliver seamless customer service.

The company’s primary concern was data accuracy, security and compliance, since the company needed to ensure that the information of its millions of customers remained secure, accurate and accessible even while standardising and streamlining an IT Service Management solution, which the ManageEngine solution facilitated.

ServiceDesk Plus is built with industry-recommended IT Service Management best practices and is packed with contextual IT and business integrations that help service desk teams better align with their organisation’s business objectives. ServiceDesk Plus also helps organisations design, deliver and support their business and IT services through native enterprise service management capabilities and unrestricted extensibility offered through low-code scripting.

Benefits of ServiceDesk Plus

Implementation of ManageEngine’s IT Service Management solution has proven to be instrumental in achieving a fivefold increase in response time and empowered the company with visibility to make informed, data-driven decisions.

“ManageEngine’s ITSM solution ServiceDesk Plus successfully reduced the workload of Kuwait Telecommunications Company’s customer support team. Our solution enhanced the team’s ability to effectively monitor and resolve problems, enabling early identification of issue patterns and offering solutions for similar issues in the future,” said Prasanna Venkatesh Srinivasan, Regional Manager at ManageEngine.

The IT Service Management solution significantly reduced the workload of Kuwait Telecommunications Company’s customer support. By placing a centralised ticketing system, it enhanced their ability to swiftly track and resolve issues, enabling early identification of issue trends and offering solutions to resolve similar issues in the future.

ServiceDesk Plus empowered Kuwait Telecommunications Company’s end users to make use of an easily accessible self-service portal to log tickets. Seamless integration with other third-party applications and systems allowed for an optimised experience enhancing operational efficiency and data flow, completed by real-time, advanced analytics.

The IT Service Management solution has been a game-changer for the telecom company. It has led to:

• Five times faster delivery and response time for raised tickets.
• Automation of the ticketing system to enable workload visibility.
• Over 90% of tickets resolved within stated SLAs over the past year.
• Reduced turnaround time and issue resolution for end users.

Scaling the implementation

With the successful implementation of ServiceDesk Plus, Kuwait Telecommunications Company has invested in other ManageEngine products, including OpManager’s Enterprise edition, Applications Manager, and Analytics Plus.

Kuwait Telecommunications Company is using OpManager to manage their networking monitoring requirements wherein OpManager can set up a 24X7 monitoring system and provides deep visibility into the performances of the organisation’s routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, wireless LAN controllers, servers, VMs, printers and storage devices.

Applications Manager enabled Kuwait Telecommunications Company to provide real-time insights into the complexities of application performance thereby ensuring high availability and performance for their critical applications and servers.

Kuwait Telecommunications Company also employs Analytics Plus which enables visibility to IT data from several applications and features an AI-powered analytics assistant that responds to voice and text prompts to provide meaningful visualisations.

The implementation has been a game-changer at Kuwait Telecommunications Company, enhancing workload visibility and reducing overall turnaround time and issue resolution for end users. Over 90% of the customer issues were resolved within specified SLAs in the past year.

“We are convinced and satisfied with the overall results we have achieved. This is a successful IT Service Management project, one we can claim as a benchmark in Kuwait,” said Al Akili.