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Michael Chan
GeoVerra
Michael Chan, Director of Information Technology at GeoVerra, one of Canada’s largest geomatics firms, needed a better solution for the company’s internal IT service desk. Its working solution, JitBit, was little more than a shared inbox where staff spent much of their time manually redirecting and forwarding tickets to the right person. They even had to rely on an Excel sheet to track and monitor tickets—no small feat for an IT team serving a company of 700 employees— further revealing the shortcomings of their chosen help desk solution. The company was paying a considerable sum to lack the features, automation, and integrations built into other help desk platforms like BoldDesk.
After looking for other IT professionals’ experiences with help desk solutions, Michael discovered BoldDesk. While he was initially skeptical of the product since it was relatively young in the help desk software space, its depth of features and affordability quickly convinced Michael that BoldDesk was the right choice for GeoVerra.
Challenges
Core feature shortfalls
GeoVerra’s previous help desk software was characterized by manual misery that stifled productivity. “It really took away from the actual troubleshooting and employees’ growth and learning because they were tasked with so much manual tracking,” noted Michael. The absence of ticket management capabilities also led to an environment where mistakes and delays were more likely to occur. Agents had to constantly monitor the shared inbox for updates to tickets they were responsible for and to see if their assistance was requested on another ticket. As anyone with an email inbox knows, it becomes very easy to overlook what’s important.
Metrics without meaning
Beyond the basic functions of the platform, the analytics and data insights were severely limited as well. When Michael needed to present hard data about his department’s operations to company leadership, he found that “These numbers, they didn’t mean much. What we needed was more reporting capabilities based on certain things that we liked.” Without the capability to dive into its operational data, the IT team was obstructed from making well-informed decisions that could improve the team’s operations and enhance the value it delivered to the rest of the company.
Inert service and opaque processes
On the customer side of the service desk platform, Michael noted that “the platform we were on just wasn’t that flexible or user-engaging.” The portal acted as more of a mailbox where users would submit their issues and receive an obligatory “We’ll get back to you” message. The interface lacked transparency in the process and progress for customers who submitted tickets, and no collaboration or further engagement with tickets was possible for the agents working on them.
Solution
Finding a new solution in BoldDesk
While browsing Reddit for other IT professionals’ experiences with help desk software, Michael discovered BoldDesk. “We were a little cautious about going to BoldDesk. It was kind of new.” However, the platform’s thorough feature set, built upon more than two decades of experience developing enterprise UI components, impressed Michael to the point that he speculated an engineer or two may have been poached from other help desk providers to build BoldDesk.
BoldDesk provides affordability, scalability, and value
Besides the features, the pricing BoldDesk offered was unmatched by other providers. Most pushed new users to a custom, enterprise-sized plan, one for which it was difficult to determine the actual cost. Though not a small company, GeoVerra took advantage of BoldDesk’s starter plan to evaluate and get oriented with the software before scaling it up across the company. “That’s a really unique proposition,” noted Michael. “You can tell the value is there with what BoldDesk is offering.”
Additionally, migration to a new help desk platform was a significant concern, specifically for importing data. Thanks to BoldDesk’s wide array of app and data source integrations, plus the responsive support team behind it, the transition was smooth.
Results
GeoVerra achieves a higher standard of service
Since switching to BoldDesk, GeoVerra’s service desk team has elevated its level of service to the higher standard Michael aims for. “The way we’re forecasting and trending, we have the right tools, right now, to engage our customers at our service standard,” he said.
Active, customizable customer engagement
Adding to that, the team has found it much easier to engage with customers in a natural, responsive way. “We’ve really embraced engaging our customers,” noted Michael. “It was an instant improvement.” The service desk’s customer engagement has been further enhanced at GeoVerra thanks to the BoldDesk mobile app. In the previous solution, Michael’s team had to monitor the shared service desk inbox 24/7. The BoldDesk mobile app lets each agent control the types of notifications they receive and perform the same ticket actions they would on a desktop or laptop, including filter, search, reply, share, modify, and update.
Higher productivity through automation
As for operational efficiency, GeoVerra’s service desk has seen at least a 25% improvement. “The key thing was utilizing the service desk software and reducing the manual labor involved with the service desk, putting more onto BoldDesk to alleviate [the manual processes] and act as another employee,” Michael said.
BoldDesk’s built-in round-robin assignment has been another highlight for the GeoVerra team. Other help desk solutions that offer this feature often limit it to higher pricing tiers, but BoldDesk provides it at an affordable price point. Plus, BoldDesk offers two types of round-robin assignment, even distribution and load-based, allowing Michael’s team to balance its workload as needed for optimum performance.
Built-in analytics and reports drive team success
BoldDesk’s built-in analytics and reports also facilitated efficiency gains by surfacing insights into support traffic and agent performance. The team can analyze when and how tickets are being submitted, allowing them to better distribute working hours to best address the most issues, which is an important capability when delivering support to customers across multiple time zones. Not only have these built-in reports made Michael’s job easier when it comes to presenting data about the team’s operations to company leadership, but they have also played an important role in determining where the team can grow and improve.
Michael and his team can evaluate each agent’s performance in relation to specific tickets or over the long term and use that information to better prepare the team to deal with similar issues in the future. Michael’s team has also leveraged the built-in customer satisfaction surveys to collect feedback directly from the customers they’re servicing. This element of direct response was not possible in GeoVerra’s previous support platform, and it aligns perfectly with the team’s mission to more deeply engage with customers.
Simple setup across all BoldDesk features
BoldDesk’s easy configuration has been another quickly realized benefit, allowing the GeoVerra team to set up the platform to suit its needs. Single sign-on via Entra ID and OpenID cleared complicated authentication and authorization hurdles, and setting up the knowledge base was “very clean, super straightforward.” Before BoldDesk, GeoVerra’s IT team stored informational articles in SharePoint, but the team found that few customers ever consulted it, and it felt like a static, lifeless resource. Now, GeoVerra publishes educational resources to BoldDesk’s powerful knowledge base module. “It’s very lightweight, so it’s quick and it’s keyword searchable,” said Michael. “I would say we’ve experienced a minimum 50% improvement over our stale, static SharePoint site.” Utilizing the knowledge base features of BoldDesk also helps reduce the IT team’s workload by providing an easily accessible self-service support option for routine issues.
BoldDesk’s unmatched, responsive support
As GeoVerra grew comfortable with BoldDesk, they occasionally found a specific feature missing, but they communicated the issue to the BoldDesk team. “We were shocked that you guys listened to us, too,” recalled Michael. “We’d email you guys, ‘We wish there was this feature,’ and then next month, the feature comes out. You don’t get that traditionally.” The release cycle for BoldDesk is bimonthly, and the product road map is completely transparent, accessible, and influenceable at any time—feedback from BoldDesk users is the guiding force behind the product.
Across its intuitive UI, powerful features, affordable pricing, easy configuration, and stellar support, BoldDesk is the sound choice for any business looking to level up its customer support. “We were lucky to find you guys,” said Michael. “I’m hoping other people have that same experience.”
Supercharge your support operations with BoldDesk
For a guided tour into how BoldDesk can transform your help desk, book a live demo with one of our product experts today. Or, if you’re ready to jump right in, start a free 15-day trial.
