The Business Challenge: Reduce Tickets and Escalations
USACI is a Managed Service Provider (MSP) that provides Software as a Service (SaaS) and Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solutions over Citrix XenApp and Citrix XenDesktop. They also offer public and private cloud services via their product, XenWinGo. The breadth of services which the organization offers can place a lot of pressure on their Citrix help desk professionals. Customer questions tend to be more technical, and often the issues raised require more expert intervention, such as restarting printers, servers, or specific applications like QuickBooks. In many Managed Service Providers like USACI, these tasks must be escalated up to more senior (and expensive) resources, who are already engaged in other projects. MSPs like USACI have a higher volume of similar calls or recurring issues across multiple clients, meaning the same issue can be escalated several times in a single day for intervention and resolution. This leads to delays and/or downtime, and MSPs require a more effective solution to reduce these repetitive Citrix help desk tickets. For Managed Service Providers, these issues are critical because they don’t just lead to inefficiency or customer satisfaction issues, they can impact the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that are at the heart of their business.
USACI needed a solution to empower their help desk professionals to proactively anticipate, troubleshoot, and prevent Citrix XenApp and Citrix XenDesktop end user issues in a timely fashion. The tool needed to not only reduce tickets, but reduce expensive escalations as well, thereby freeing up senior team members from repetitive remediation tasks. Finally, the ideal solution needed features that would support the specific requirements of the MSP business model.
The Solution: Embedded Intelligence and Automation with Goliath Performance Monitor
USACI leveraged Goliath Technologies’ embedded intelligence and automation to assist help desk personnel to more quickly identify and resolve issues. Goliath delivered this with 250+ built-in rules and alerts, based on events, conditions, and failures points identified from Goliath’s extensive experience with the key failure points in complex VDI environments like Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, and VMware Horizon. The system automatically monitors and troubleshoots key failure points based on pre-defined specific thresholds to warn IT professionals about system degradation before end users are impacted.
Not only does the Goliath Performance Monitor provide the alerts and rules out of the box, but the system can take automated remediation actions based on these conditions. USACI reported the largest improvements in performance after the implementation of these automatic actions. USACI used these to not only restart servers or applications, but to execute PowerShell scripts immediately as conditions were met. They also easily customized additional remediation actions for their specific products and environments.
The improvements were extended, however, with the addition of Goliath’s Alert Resolution feature. Using this, senior technicians and architects were able to provide specific instructions to the IT help desk for recurring issues that empowered them to resolve issues that previously would have been escalated to engineers or architects.
While the key functionality of the embedded intelligence was a big factor in USACI’s decision to choose Goliath Technologies, they also uncovered another major advantage within the tool – dashboards and built-in reports. Goliath Performance Monitor is purpose-built for MSPs with key features, such as multi-tenancy, vendor billing reconciliation, and remote site IT infrastructure discovery. USACI used Goliath’s built-in reports to track their customers’ activity and automatically bill them accordingly. This resulted in significant additional savings compared to purchasing or customizing other software. The combination of embedded intelligence, automated remediation, and built-in reports made the Goliath Performance Monitor the perfect IT help desk solution for USACI.
The Result: Support Tickets and Escalations Reduced by over 20%
Since the Goliath Performance Monitor was put in place, total support call volume has decreased by over 20%. The USACI help desk team receives fewer calls relating to printer and QuickBooks issues since the automated remediation feature simultaneously alerts the team and resolves the issues. They are now able to focus on calls which require more special attention. The reduced calls and alert resolution features combined to substantially reduce the number and cost of escalated Citrix help desk tickets by much more than 20%. This result has increased productivity from the senior technical team on critical projects and, more importantly, an increase in overall customer satisfaction and SLA achievement.
This is one example of how our customers use Goliath Technologies to anticipate, troubleshoot, and prevent end user experience issues. To see how Goliath Performance Monitor can give you the visibility required to troubleshoot issues in your Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, or VMware Horizon environments, please contact us.