Technical Support

Troubleshooting computer issues requires broad technical knowledge, a logical approach and excellent communication. The complexity of today’s business IT means that support organisations must have a large team with a lot of experience across a diverse range of technologies and solutions.

How Kiandra delivers technical support

To Kiandra, support for any problem is about knowledge, process and people. We invest a significant portion of our time learning and building solutions in our lab to truly understand the solutions we deliver to our clients. Kiandra Best Practise documents for configuration and support are built and shared with the team. This gives us a strong body of knowledge to work from and equips us to support a wide range of technologies.

Here’s the process we follow when working on issues.

The first stage is the detection of the issue – this can occur by a client recognising there is a problem, or by being picked up by Kiandra’s monitoring systems, which are available to clients in most Service Agreements.

A ticket is logged by the Melbourne-based Kiandra Service Desk team along with supporting information (details of the problem, its context and so on), and initial (level one) troubleshooting is commenced to determine if there is a quick-fix available. A ticket number is generated at this point and this is used to track the progress of the problem. The Service Desk is the central point of contact for the entire support process, and is responsible for managing the ticket throughout its lifecycle. The issue is looked up to see if this is a recurring issue or similar to one which has been solved previously.

Remote support tools are normally used to gather preliminary information, or it may be deduced from the client calling in with the issue. Most service agreements have performance targets in place – service level agreements - which specify the responsiveness of support services from the time an issue is detected and acknowledged, until the time we commence troubleshooting and resolution services.

If the issue cannot be solved in the first instance then it is escalated to a support engineer with skills in the relevant technologies to perform further troubleshooting and resolution tasks. All information logged by the Service Desk is immediately available to the support engineer working on the problem, keeping the process quick and efficient.

There are various workflow rules which are in place to ensure that tickets – and problems – are never abandoned, that clients are always informed on the progress of the issue, and to manage the amount of time spent working on an issue – ensuring that the time taken is appropriate for the specifics and impact of any given problem.

All works performed are recorded progressively and time-stamped so that reviews of larger tickets can be conducted and so there is a continuum of knowledge if the ticket needs to be escalated again. This also means that if  an engineer working on a ticket is not able to complete the support process (due to illness or other work clashes) then another team member can pick up the ticket efficiently.

Once a problem has been resolved, the ticket is marked complete, pending follow-up, with a summary of the cause and resolution drafted for future troubleshooting assistance. The client is usually contacted in a day or so following the resolution of the issue to confirm that operations are still nominal, at which point the ticket is formally closed.

The Service Desk team is overseen by the Service Desk Manager who in turn reports to the Technology Infrastructure Manager to ensure that the most efficient and appropriate course of action is taken for all tickets. Comprehensive, in-depth reviews are conducted during and after large problems to ensure that our people and processes are the best they can be.

Summary

The design and selection of the centralised Service Desk, the ticketing system and the progressive documentation requirements mean that we have completely removed key person dependencies for the entire team. And by distributing tickets for all clients across the entire support team we are able to have a number of engineers available who have worked with any particular client before.

Technical support experience and certifications

Our vendor partnerships (such as Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, VMware Enterprise Partner, Symantec Silver Partner and Citrix Solution Advisor) allow us to keep up to date with current, best-of-breed technologies and solutions, improving support efficiency. We also require all engineers – whether Service Desk or Support or Project Engineers – to have at least one formal industry recognised certification (ie, Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, Cisco Certified Network Associate, Citrix Certified Enterprise Administrator) so you can be assured that engineers working on your environment know their stuff.

We’ve been testing, building and supporting technology solutions for business since 1995 and we think our team and our abilities puts us ahead of the rest.