Accenture’s employee technology support transformation journey optimizes service while reducing costs to serve

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Client profileWith more than 323,000 employees operating in more than 200 cities in 56 countries, Accenture has a large information technology (IT) environment to support. For Accenture’s internal IT organization, this means managing over 50 gigabytes of network bandwidth, 353,000 e-mail accounts and close to 200 million minutes of Microsoft Lync audio per month.

Hardware and network

325,000 workstations deployed

96,400 mobile devices

5,500 servers managed

930 servers in the public cloud

50 gigabytesnetwork bandwidth managed

Websites

214,000 unique visitors to the Accenture Portal per month

1.1M unique visitors to accenture.com per month

Applications

275 global applications

251 local applications supported

Single instance global SAP ERP

Collaboration

353,000 e-mail accounts

9.2 million e-mail messages per day

800,000 video minutes per month (room-based systems)

13,000Microsoft SharePoint sites

186 millionminutes of Microsoft Lync audio supported per month

11.6 million videoconferencing minutes per month

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Accenture’s technology environment

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OpportunityThe overall challenge for Accenture’s internal IT organization is providing high-quality, easily accessible, intuitive technology support across a vast, multi-location employee base at optimal cost, while ensuring high levels of employee satisfaction. Fortunately, employee technology support is made easier through Accenture’s streamlined infrastructure with a single application technology platform, fewer than 300 global business applications and a robust collaboration infrastructure. Getting to this streamlined environment was a more than decade-long transformational journey, during which time the employee technology support model has been developed into a highly efficient and cost-effective support solution.

A decade ago Accenture’s technology support environment was quite different. Local service desks operated independently in each country offering telephone support only and using different tools and processes between locations. Local office support teams were based in most office locations and were readily accessible to employees. Self-service was in its infancy with a basic solution-based website just starting to be introduced.

Today, Accenture’s technology support model consists of a well-established, self-service capability that receives 60 percent of employee contacts. Different contact channels (Web, phone, e-mail and chat) feed into a Global Service Desk organization that comprises approximately 200 agents across six Accenture locations globally (Buenos Aires, Dublin, Bangalore, Delhi, Manila and Dalian, China) that provide multi-language support 24x7x365. The Service Desk resolves almost 80 percent of the issues it receives (70 percent at the first point of contact) with remaining issues escalated to highly skilled remote or local support teams.

SolutionSince the transformational journey began, Accenture’s internal IT organization has collaborated with the business at many levels, including setting a cohesive vision and strategy that underpins all initiatives undertaken. Focus has been on providing a one-stop shop for accessible, employee-focused and cost-effective, end-to-end support services that minimize the impact of incidents on customer productivity.

“Our vision for employee technology support is really a two-pronged approach,” says Louise Cowper, Accenture Technology Support Strategy Lead. “It’s not just about reactive support. We see the mission of our support teams being to proactively support Accenture people in getting the best out of their technology and applications. However, when issues do come up, we aim to provide a one-stop shop for support to get people back up and running as quickly as possible. We give employees a choice of ways to contact support, so they can decide what suits them best.”

The strategy behind that vision evolves based on technology, industry and user trends as well as business drivers. The current strategy has four key drivers:

• Consumerization

• Accenture workplace strategy

• Employee productivity

• Cost to serve

In real terms, this strategy means providing employees with simple, intuitive, consumer-style self-service tools, flexibility and device independence to support their personal preferences and work styles. It also means minimal resolution times and remote tools to keep employees productive without interruption from technology issues—while continually increasing the value provided by IT through driving down costs.

To enable further development of the employee technology support vision, Accenture’s internal IT organization is focusing on four strategic areas:

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Proactive support Educate employees to understand and get the best use from their technology to minimize the risk of problems occurring.

The self-service portal has a heavy emphasis on “proactive support,” providing technology-related information, tips and educational videos to help Accenture people understand and get the most out of their technology. Additionally, social tools are starting to be introduced for critical apps so Accenture people can help each other. Another advantage is getting “tips and tricks” from each other to help all personnel learn new things and become more productive. The focus on proactive support and problem prevention helps reduce lost productivity and helps lower support costs.

Digital agenda Connect with employees through consumer-style, self-enablement portal and use social media channels to offer support.

The Technology Support self-service portal is well established among Accenture people with the majority of support contacts made through this channel. The portal is a true “one-stop shop” where employees can go to find technology solutions and request services, submit and check status of tickets, start a Web chat with the Service Desk, view outage information for key services, see personalized information and have one place from which to find the information they need all in one place.

The self-service area is one of continuous improvement and investment with new capabilities being added to drive more incident volume via self-service channels. Imminent developments in this area include a complete redesign to modernize and simplify the user interface, personalize content to the individual person as well as add social media support options (employee-to-employee support and potentially agent-driven support in the medium term). Leading-edge analytics are being developed to measure incident resolution success and to further improve content. The longer-term goal is to have all support and services that can be self-enabled, provisioned that way.

Employee centricityProvide simple, intuitive access to all technology support and services.

The development of the self-service portal owes much to extensive user profiling and analysis to build real-life, Accenture-specific “user stories” that define what employees need from their support organization. The support model is designed with the employee experience front of mind, providing a choice of ways to interact with the support organization to best suit an individual’s work style and needs. The objective is to enable simple, streamlined access to all technology support and services, making it easy for employees to get help at point of need, without having to understand the internal IT structure.

Remote supportEnable and support Accenture people serving clients at client locations to be as productive as possible.

Remote support capabilities have been stepped up in recent years to reflect changing work patterns and the general shift toward highly mobile or home-based workers. The goal of remote support is to make support available and resolve issues anywhere, anytime, keeping Accenture people productive at client sites, without the need for an in-person or office-based visit.

Accenture’s Technology Support organization offers remote support at both the Service Desk for more routine troubleshooting, and via the Remote Technology Support teams who are positioned as the equivalent to local office “desk-side” support teams and who provide remote resolution for complex issues. The Remote Technology Support teams operate from five offshore locations globally to facilitate 24x5 multi-language support. These teams today resolve 70 percent of the PC software issues that would previously have been resolved by onshore local teams.

The business benefits of introducing Tier 2 remote support are numerous: Accenture people remain productive in the field, the support is cost-effective as remote teams are located offshore, and local office support teams are freed up to focus on higher-value activities. Local office support teams themselves are being repositioned to focus on account management and service management versus direct service delivery, plus delivery of value-added services and support of client engagements. Hardware support is transitioning to a “restore not repair” model that will be facilitated by device independence and the personal computer image being stored in the cloud, negating the need for costly onshore intervention.

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Results With the technology support model Accenture has in place today, it is able to address business needs by enabling remote personnel to work efficiently and collaboratively. “The internal IT organization has done a tremendous job of keeping on top of ever-changing technology and user trends and evolving support solutions in response,” says Marc Thiollier, Geographic Services Managing Director. Accenture keeps employees productive without interruption of technology issues through a continuous focus on improving employee technology support. And, as Accenture’s headcount has grown, growth has occurred without increasing help desk incidents.

Additionally, Accenture’s internal IT organization has been able to address the complexity of Accenture’s environment while providing high-quality, proactive technology support and reducing costs to serve. “Our average global support cost per employee has declined by 73 percent over the last 12 years,” says Tony Leraris, Infrastructure Services for Accenture Lead. “Cost-effectiveness has steadily improved as we have implemented our strategy.” Cost benefits are driven by offshoring, self-service and the elimination of the need for people to call the help desk in the first place. For example, approximately 40 percent of all incidents per month are resolved by users via self-service (including self-service password reset).

Achieving high performance in technology support at Accenture is an ongoing journey with opportunities for efficiencies and improvements to be made. Future initiatives are to consolidate remaining local service desks into the global operation, add new capabilities to the self-service portal focusing on the employee experience and widening the portals appeal to “Generation Y.” Tier 2 remote technology support will continue to evolve with further issue types moving across from local support teams, and local support operation itself will be radically redesigned.

Overall, Accenture continues to look at how it can drive more issues to optimize support service delivery, in particular, through self-service channels and enabling people to resolve their own issues, simply and quickly.

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The overall challenge for Accenture’s internal IT organization is providing high-quality, easily accessible, intuitive technology support across a vast, multi-location employee base at optimal cost, and while ensuring high levels of employee satisfaction.

About AccentureAccenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 323,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$30.0 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2014. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

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