Consultancy firm Mercer Human Resource Consulting has
been able to achieve a ‘cost per call’ rate that is lower than the
industry average as a result of outsourcing some of its IT
services.
Mercer, which has around 3,000 staff spread across 26 sites in
the UK, has selectively outsourced its desktop, laptop and printer
support services to Computacenter since 1999. These services are
co-ordinated through a central service desk, which handles the
management of Mercer’s 4,500 desktops/laptops and 1,300 printers.
The service desk receives approximately 7,000 calls a month from
users.
Mercer has operations across the globe, and supports companies
through business challenges such as mergers and acquisitions,
change management, and globalisation. “Our users do business all
over the world, and they often need access to technology outside of
core working hours. Desktop and printer management is not a core
skill for Mercer, and we were keen to drive down costs as much as
possible,” says Nigel Cowton, Workforce Services Manager at
Mercer.
Computacenter provides Mercer with both on-site and remote
support services, which are subject to industry-recognised
benchmarking to ensure optimum performance and ongoing cost
benefits. The benchmarking is based on averages provided by IT
researcher and analyst Gartner that are specific to the relevant
business sector, and encompasses various core competencies, such as
first-time fix rate and average call answer time.
“Although it is vital that companies improve their service
levels, this must be approached holistically,” says Cowton. “The
benchmarking provides us with a full picture of our IT service
performance, and we are able to embark on improvements in an
integrated manner rather than on a case by-case basis.”