Email and Calendaring Social Community Decreases IT Support Caseload

In my previous blog post, I talked about how adding a social support layer enabled the IT Mobility team within Cisco to realize cost avoidance of $650k, which was leveraged for new, innovative projects.

Benefits were also seen in Cisco IT’s Email and Calendaring WebEx Social community. Since it’s launch in Q4FY12, the Email and Calendaring Services community has seen more than 33,000 visitors and 300,000 views spread across collaborative wiki posts and discussion forums. The discussion forum alone has over 500 individual discussions through moderated support and user contribution, resulting in a self-service model for those who may have a similar question or issue.

In addition, the Email and Calendaring team had several other large initiatives contributing to the decrease in support cases over the past two years: Exchange 2010 migration, increased mailbox quota, Office 2010 deployment, and official Mac support. These initiatives combined with the social community have led to significant cost avoidance by reducing help desk caseloads for Cisco IT as seen by the amount of individual discussions and community views.

Support case trends for email are tracked on a case per mailbox basis.  In Q2FY12, Cisco IT had 129,939 mailboxes and 18,609 support cases opened. One year later in Q3FY13, the number of mailboxes grew 6% to 137,674, but the support cases decreased roughly 35% to 12,094. These numbers show a decrease in support cases per mailbox from .143 (Q3FY12) to  .089 (Q3FY13) or a ~38% decrease.

Cisco IT continues to see the benefit in using WebEx Social through updating and consolidating of employee self-service information and documentation, as well as, using collaborative wiki posts and discussion forums to reduce IT support caseload.

For more information on Cisco IT’s Exchange 2010 on Cisco UCS, click here.

For more information on how Wiki Helps Macintosh Users with Self-Support, Reduces Costs for Cisco, click here.