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Help Desk

Today's corporate Information Technology (IT) is challenged to create a strategic advantage for the organization as a whole.  While this challenge for IT management is daunting enough, it becomes especially difficult in an ever more complex environment where urgent support demands come from almost every part of the enterprise. 

The reputation of IT is often determined by its response to simple support requests instead of being judged by the strategic advantages created by their efforts.  Sparkhound provides a simple yet effective solution for this problem.  Our Help Desk services allow your team to focus on the high-value strategic projects while our select team of analysts takes on the responsibility for well-defined and routine support functions within your environment.  By using industry best practices and resources, the Sparkhound

Help Desk team will meet or exceed predetermined performance levels with accuracy and consistency. 

Why Outsource Help Desk?
Sparkhound provides Help Desk Support to several large government agencies and private companies across Louisiana.  There are several factors that make outsourcing Help Desk a great fit for many organizations including:

Management Focus	By outsourcing Help Desk services, our clients delegate this important support function to a team of people whose sole focus is providing consistently high-quality Help Desk Support.
Return on Investment	Sparkhound's help desk support is provided by a significantly larger pool of analysts than can be feasibly hired internally by a each of our clients.  Thus, each client has a larger pool of support analysts available during a key outage or system implementation. Furthermore, our clients no longer need to purchase or maintain automated call distribution (ACD) systems or help desk ticketing software applications.
Cost	The overall cost for the Sparkhound's Help Desk service is generally equal to or lower than staffing the Help Desk internally.
Dedicated Staff	Sparkhound employs the “best and brightest” young IT professionals as our Help Desk analysts who employ the best practices of the Help Desk Institute.  Your organization will have a team of professionals who are dedicated to making sure that problems are solved in a quick and courteous manner.
Accountability	Every Help Desk caller immediately receives a ticket number that they use throughout the life of the problem for tracking purposes.  Thus, clients can verify that all service levels are maintained through daily, weekly, and monthly reports.  Furthermore, random client surveys can be emailed daily or weekly to gauge the user satisfaction for percentage of help desk tickets.

Leverage the expertise at Sparkhound .  We bring you the experience gained from providing literally thousands of solutions in all areas of computer networking for almost a decade.  We give you the time and talent you need---- when you need it—to effectively manage your IT operations

Features & Benefits

Call Logging	Sparkhound will maintain a database of all calls for tracking purposes.  The call log contains basic data pertinent to each caller (name, cost center, nature or problem, notes, etc.).
Request Tracking System	Sparkhound has developed a custom ticketing software, SparkTrack, to track all Help Desk calls and resolutions.  All clients are licensed to fully use SparkTrack or they can choose to use the ticketing software of their choice.
User Access	Sparkhound will provide user access to the help desk through a toll free number, or via email for users to enter their own tickets.
Software Supported	Sparkhound's Help Desk supports the most commonly used software applications, including Windows 2000 / XP, Office, Lotus Notes, Norton Antivirus, Internet Explorer.  Other applications may be supported upon request.
Reports	Sparkhound provides daily, weekly, and monthly Help Desk reports.  These include Daily ticket distribution, Daily/weekly/monthly call data, and service utilization are a sample of the reports currently available.  This will help our client identify support patterns such that they can be prevented.
Escalation Procedures	When problems arise that cannot be solved by Level 1 support, Sparkhound escalates the problem to the appropriate parties to solve the problem.  That said, Sparkhound will continue to track the problem through resolution.

Service Level Agreements
Upon establishing the service for each Help Desk client, Sparkhound works with the client to identify the proper service levels for problem resolution rates and other important measures of success.  The determination of these success parameters leads to Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that exist through the life of the support program.  Some sample SLAs include: