Yakka Tech Pty Ltd
\\Yakkatech, Inc.
Steven L. McShane, University of Western Australia
YakkaTech Inc. is an information technology services firm employing 1,500 people throughout Washington and Oregon. YakkaTech has a consulting division, which mainly installs and upgrades enterprise software systems and related hardware on the client’s site. YakkaTech also has a customer service division that consists of four customer contact centers serving clients within each region.
Each customer service center consists of a half-dozen departments representing functional specializations (computer systems, intranet infrastructure, storage systems, enterprise software systems, customer billing, etc.). These centers typically have more than two dozen employees in each department. When a client submits a problem to the center by e-mail or telephone, the message or call is directed to the department where the issue best applies. The query is given a “ticket” number and assigned to the next available employee in that department. Individual employees are solely responsible for the tickets assigned to them. The employee investigates and corrects the issue, and the ticket is “closed” when the problem has been resolved.
If the client experiences the same problem again, even a few days later, a new ticket is issued and sent to whichever employee is available to receive the ticket. A client’s problems are almost always handled by different employees each time, even when the issue is sent to the same department. Furthermore, when a customer center department is heavily backlogged, clients are redirected to the same department at another regional center where their problem can be addressed more quickly.
At one time, YakkaTech operated more than a dozen small customer contact centers throughout the region because client problems had to be diagnosed and resolved on-site. Today, employees can investigate most software and hardware system faults from the center through remote monitoring systems, rather than
Steven L. McShane, University of Western Australia
YakkaTech Inc. is an information technology services firm employing 1,500 people throughout Washington and Oregon. YakkaTech has a consulting division, which mainly installs and upgrades enterprise software systems and related hardware on the client’s site. YakkaTech also has a customer service division that consists of four customer contact centers serving clients within each region.
Each customer service center consists of a half-dozen departments representing functional specializations (computer systems, intranet infrastructure, storage systems, enterprise software systems, customer billing, etc.). These centers typically have more than two dozen employees in each department. When a client submits a problem to the center by e-mail or telephone, the message or call is directed to the department where the issue best applies. The query is given a “ticket” number and assigned to the next available employee in that department. Individual employees are solely responsible for the tickets assigned to them. The employee investigates and corrects the issue, and the ticket is “closed” when the problem has been resolved.
If the client experiences the same problem again, even a few days later, a new ticket is issued and sent to whichever employee is available to receive the ticket. A client’s problems are almost always handled by different employees each time, even when the issue is sent to the same department. Furthermore, when a customer center department is heavily backlogged, clients are redirected to the same department at another regional center where their problem can be addressed more quickly.
At one time, YakkaTech operated more than a dozen small customer contact centers throughout the region because client problems had to be diagnosed and resolved on-site. Today, employees can investigate most software and hardware system faults from the center through remote monitoring systems, rather than