From 42 Desks to Intelligent Support: The Road to Success
By Andrew Hardwick, End User Services Operations Director and Katie Morlino, Service Solutions Director at Arcadis
If you’ve ever led a transformation that spanned years, time zones, and cultures, you’ll know the technology is only half the story.
The rest is people, process, and persistence. Our journey to an AI enabled chatbot did not start with algorithms—it began in 2016, when we set out to consolidate 42 disparate service desks into a single 24/7 Global Service Desk.
Our first act was global standardisation. We moved from a patchwork of local processes to unified global workflows, single queues, and a cloud-first approach to tooling. The goals were clear: visibility, consistency, and scalability.
We invested where it mattered for a Global Service Desk: cloud telephony for true support coverage worldwide, remote support tools, and self-service to reduce friction and rework.
Transformation sticks when culture supports it. We doubled down on skills, progression and recognition for our Service Desk Analysts. We also regularly reviewed CSAT to validate what was improving and what wasn’t.
Before we ever touched chat, we wrestled with the realities of global support in multiple languages. We attempted to recruit Chinese and Spanish speakers in Manila, but this proved impossible at the scale we needed. We also assessed a second Global Service Desk in Guangzhou.
Those options surfaced hard constraints—talent availability, cost, complexity, and time‑to‑operate, reinforcing the need for a scalable, technology-driven solution. This led to chat, chosen deliberately as a low-cost, high‑learning experiment. We ran a disciplined, three-phase pilot. Beginning with India, then Asia and finally EMEA and Asia.
What we saw:
- Customers loved it: We recorded an NPS of 100 in the pilot—an unmistakable signal of convenience and clarity.
- Operational guardrails mattered: Daily stand-ups, clear success criteria (e.g., % of chats serviced, ticket creation rates), and rollback triggers protected voice SLAs and backlog.
- Hard lessons: Analyst availability status and notification visibility were early friction points. We added availability reporting and coaching to address them.
We went live globally with chat in 2020, and despite all the hard work, we still hadn’t got everything right. The Global Service Desk struggled to manage chat alongside its other channels, and a lack of governance and management support contributed to this. As well as other areas during COVID, the Global Service Desk asked to switch off chat. A second attempt to launch in 2022 focused too much on technology and failed very quickly. We learnt a lot from these initial attempts, and these insights shaped the next phase of our digital journey.
We restarted our journey in March 2024, collaborating this time with a BMC partner and a strong Global Service Desk that was already primed for success.
What did good look like for us?
A seamless user experience where colleagues get fast, accurate support, self-help, and the ability to provide a 24/7 efficient non-verbal support channel. Dashboards to provide insights and avoid a reduction in CSAT scores.
Why use a Chatbot?
Providing Immediate answers through knowledge, delivering the option for real-time chat support, especially valued by our non-native English speakers.
We kept up with technology by ensuring alignment with modern digital workplaces and user expectations, whilst looking to the future industry developments and AI capabilities. This ensured a reduction in MTTR and changed behaviours for the better.
Do you want to know more?
Are you starting your Chat journey? We will be sharing more at our upcoming presentation at Spark 26 in Birmingham.
