Mitsubishi Motors in the UK – The Colt Car Company

With over 900 IT users to support spread across two main locations and around 130 dealerships, the IT department at The Colt Car Company knows the importance of speed, efficiency and top performance.

With the help of Richmond SupportDesk, the department has streamlined its help desk operation, delivering improved service to internal customers, whilst releasing technical staff to concentrate on other areas, for example new development and business system enhancements.

Richmond SupportDesk has enabled the tracking and analysis of calls into the support desk, giving the opportunity to identify potential problems with specific products and applications and additional training needs.

This analysis allows timely and effective action to be instigated so saving time, allowing the company to benefit from the economies of scale and to achieve quantifiable business benefits from the new system.

The Company

The Colt Car Company Ltd is the sole importer and distributor of Mitsubishi cars and light commercial vehicles and is the official franchise holder for the UK market. The company is UK owned with a 49% interest held by Mitsubishi Corporation.

The central IT department provides help desk support to all PC users within the company – some 250 – and to the dealership network of around 130 sites. With each dealership having on average five PC users, the IT department provides support and development services to 900 workers.

Why Change?

Over the years, as employees have been empowered on the desktop, the number and mix of applications available to people has proliferated. With the increased usage and dependence on PCs, Colt needed to provide an efficient support service for the complex systems now operated by virtually all employees.

The IT department wanted a way to track the type of calls coming into the service desk, to help identify any potential problems with specific products or applications. The previous in-house developed system did not provide this level of information. By identifying recurring problems, the department was able to supply one fix to all users. The subsequent time saved enabled the skilled personnel in the IT department to concentrate on their other business objectives – to develop and enhance new and existing systems.

The Solution

Richmond SupportDesk was selected because it provided comprehensive functionality comparable with the larger systems on the market, but at a more affordable price.

Richmond SupportDesk enabled Colt to start on a small scale with just five users and because of its scalability, to allow for expansion. Based on Microsoft technology, Richmond SupportDesk could be installed quickly without any additional cost and integrated easily with other applications.

The department has now grown to 16 people, all using Richmond SupportDesk to log requests for desktop support and development projects. Any enhancement requests received are also logged and evaluated from a business perspective, costed and prioritised using Richmond SupportDesk.

Gathering information in one central system has been a key feature in enabling The IT department to manage a huge increase in workload, whilst delivering a better service to its customers.

How did it work?

SupportDesk replaced a previous in-house procedure that did not allow any analysis. The strong reporting features within Richmond SupportDesk enable Colt to analyse where calls are coming from, categorise and then prioritise calls.

Any development requests that come into the department are also tracked.

Richmond SupportDesk has enabled the department to gather all the information into one central location, making monthly review meetings far more effective, as the information required to make decisions regarding enhancements and development work is easily available.

Dave Berwick, Information Services Manager at Colt explained:

“Since launching the internal service desk to the rest of the business we have found the number of calls we capture has soared, as staff take advantage of the new service and have come to rely on us. At the same time the business was expanding, so the new, more robust platform based on SQL enabled us to streamline our operation even further.”

Return on Investment

When asked about return on investment, Dave commented:

“The ability for any member of the IT team to look up details of all calls logged with the service desk and give a rapid response has contributed significantly towards the control of our overheads.”

He continued, “Richmond SupportDesk has successfully enabled Mitsubishi Motors in the UK to provide a far superior service to our internal customers, with relatively small start up costs and low ongoing costs, particularly when compared to other products on the market.”

Benefits

After the introduction of e-mail support, staff were therefore able to e-mail their requests for help in which Richmond SupportDesk sends an immediate acknowledgement. Dave Berwick explained:

“We are still operating a telephone support service but we are encouraging people to use the e-mail service where possible by means of an automated answering system. As more people have tried using e-mail to log support requests, its popularity has increased because they are guaranteed an immediate acknowledgement.”

In the first three months the number of internal support calls being processed using e-mail has increased to 25%. The next step is to provide a similar service to the dealerships using the web module. Staff at the dealers will be able to log support requests via the corporate intranet.

An additional benefit that has improved efficiency within the IT department is the ability to customise the view that the end-user sees on the desktop. Various teams support the different systems and with Richmond SupportDesk it is possible to tailor the “Open Calls” screen to show just the calls that relate to that group of people. It is easy to manipulate these views so each new project can have screens to exactly suit its particular requirements, thereby improving productivity.

Dave Berwick summarised the relationship with Richmond Systems:

“The experience of dealing with Richmond has been a very positive one. The product is stable and well engineered, and has contributed significantly to our ability to provide a fast, efficient support function to the business. We have benefited from the comfortable ride Richmond SupportDesk now provides and have enjoyed the experience.”

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