A project to reduce the number of support calls fielded by its IT support team has led electrical retailer Comet to use the underpinning technology for offering customer self-service.

The use of Hornbill’s Supportworks ITSM product has lowered the number of calls made to the service desk by 40 per cent, while the number of support queries successfully answered within the agreed SLA (Service Level Agreement) has reached 94 per cent, helping to improve satisfaction among the 10,000 employees.

Rob Gwatkin, service desk manager at Comet Group says that self-service is now the big target to drive further improvements. “Our target is to reduce our call volumes by 50 per cent giving us a total reduction of 70 per since implementing the system.” The self-service system is expected to deal with common queries, such as password resets which account for 20 per cent of all support calls, without the need for human intervention.”

The project is supported by a methodical approach to tracking the reasons why people call, analysing why certain problems are occurring and fixing issues before they impact users, an approach put forward by the ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) best practice framework.