ALPHA COM Deutschland GmbH is a nationwide service provider for the professional processing of documents.

Efficient processes contribute greatly to entrepreneurial success and are the foundation to bringing about optimizations and increasing service quality.

The core business of ALPHA COM Deutschland GmbH is document management – the company promises more efficiency through intelligent processes. Document processing affects every company – no matter how small or large it is or to which industry it belongs – and often holds great potential for optimization. ALPHA COM offers efficient, tried-and-tested processes. It works with its customers to develop the ideal – and, if necessary, individual – processes for handling paper and electronic documents. ALPHA COM service concepts, such as electronic archiving and inventory transfer or electronic incoming mail and support in accounting, enable customers to dispense with manual routine tasks and create economically attractive impulses.

ALPHA COM's IT Service Desk plays a central role when it comes to customer satisfaction. It is the point of contact for a wide range of customer questions, such as those relating to the agreed information logistics processes and associated service requests or fault reports.

In addition to its customer focus, ALPHA COM's IT Service Desk is also responsible for requests from its own employees. This involves classic IT aspects as well as complex individual requests.

Requests are often processed directly in the IT Service Desk – in the case of extended 1st level support. After appropriate qualification, complex requests are handled in expert teams, such as IT system administration or software development in the 2nd level framework.

In addition, a significant proportion of incoming requests are generated automatically from a monitoring system – for example, when the sophisticated monitoring components at ALPHA COM detect error conditions.

So the IT Service Desk has to cope with a wide range of requirements on a daily basis. This requires technology support. Such a volume of requests cannot be handled by e-mail without losing track of everything. In order to ensure a consistently high quality of service and to constantly optimize it, an ITSM solution must provide quick and easy access to all relevant information on customer inquiries, as well as system messages, and help to increase the efficiency of service and problem-solving processes.

Against this background, the introduction of OTRS in 2017 was a logical consequence.

In order to efficiently handle a high volume of requests and automated system messages from different communication channels, an up-to-date browser-based ITSM solution, such as OTRS, is necessary.
With OTRS, the IT Service Desk handles customer requests, employee inquiries and automated system messages.

Chain emails with growing distribution lists are a thing of the past. All communication – from request to problem resolution – takes place in OTRS.
This also includes forwarding and exchanges with other departments and teams handling concerns that do not fall under the responsibility of the IT Service Desk.

By using a professional ITSM solution, communication has become much more structured and agents have quick and easy access to all the relevant information they need to process requests and system messages. This includes the processing status, history, agents involved and fully traceable communication.
This results in complete transparency with regard to the process, which not only makes the work of the IT Service Desk easier, but also ensures increased service quality. Response times are shortened and customers, and employees are always informed about the status of their concerns.

Information security and data protection are key issues at ALPHA COM. Consistent implementation of guidelines to this effect – also in relation to the ITSM solution – ensures that even cross-team tasks are processed by authorized employees through process classification and qualification.

Prioritization and the associated escalation processes play an overriding role in the IT Service Desk. Individual priorities can be assigned to the SLA for all processes and requests. This means that it is initially possible to see which processing or response times have been defined for a process – escalation processes thus become transparent, if necessary.

The employees at ALPHA COM as “internal customers” are grateful for a user-friendly and intuitive interface. The team members of the IT Service Desk can individually design “their” OTRS and configure widgets according to their needs.

The use of OTRS has increased service quality as well as employee and customer satisfaction – so one of ALPHA COM's primary goals has already been achieved.

In addition to numerous optimizations and the resulting increase in service quality that have resulted from structured communication with the leading central ITSM solution, there are other advantages that benefit the IT Service Desk team and, ultimately, ALPHA COM's customers and employees.

Multilingual usage is obligatory against the background of ALPHA COM's globally located customers. Customers can flexibly switch the OTRS interface to English, for example, and seamlessly proceed with their request. The IT Service Desk staff obtains an important overall view in an uncomplicated and speedy manner.

Configurable widgets take into account the individual requirements of ALPHA COM employees. This makes it possible, for example, to quickly see which requests are waiting for feedback or where urgent action is required. The individual configurability of the system is an important support for ALPHA COM in its daily work.

In ticket management, it is easy to see immediately which requests had been assigned to employees who are absent, whether planned or unplanned. Supervisors, for example, can quickly decide which measures may need to be initiated until the employee returns. Thanks to the fact that all important information – including all communication – can be viewed in the ticket, the process can be easily tracked and further processed.

For ALPHA COM's IT Service Desk, the ability to create detailed FAQs that can be found by a keyword search and linked to relevant assets is a key benefit of OTRS.

In the future, ALPHA COM's IT Service Desk team would like to continue benefiting from OTRS in order to consistently provide the best possible service to both customers and employees.