Status: Delivered. Described from our own delivery records. Client identity, brand and commercial terms are withheld. Figures, where given, cover the period stated and nothing beyond it.
Context
A retailer whose customer-support function served both internal colleagues and external trade customers from the same team.
It needed to start operating quickly — the standing up of the helpdesk could not wait for a full process design — and then needed the system to catch up with the complexity of the work.
The problem
- Requests arrived through several channels with no single record of what had been asked or decided.
- Internal and external users needed different visibility of the same ticket, and there was no permission model capable of expressing that.
- Documents and files attached to cases had no controlled sharing, so sensitive material moved by email.
- Ticket handling was uniform where the work was not — an urgent trade issue followed the same path as a routine internal question.
- Nobody could see how the support function was performing, and trade customers had no visibility into their own cases at all.
What we built
A helpdesk stood up quickly on standard modules
So the team had a working system before the redesign began — deliberately, because a support function cannot pause.
A role and permission model
Separating what internal staff, external trade users and administrators can see on the same ticket.
Controlled document management and sharing
Attached to the case record rather than to an inbox.
Dynamic ticket-processing workflows
With routing, escalation and service-level rules matched to ticket type rather than applied uniformly.
A reporting layer
Data pipelines feeding an analytics tool, with operational dashboards for the retailer and self-service dashboards for its trade customers.
How we delivered it
- 1
Fast start
Standard helpdesk configured and live, to stop the bleeding.
- 2
Observe the real process
For a period, with the team, before redesigning it.
- 3
Redesign in place
Roles, permissions, document handling, workflow rules, applied incrementally rather than as a relaunch.
- 4
Instrument
Pipelines and a warehouse layer over the ticket and operational data.
- 5
Publish
Internal dashboards first, then the client-facing views once the underlying numbers were trusted.
How it was phased
Indicative phasing for work of this shape. Actual duration varies with data quality, access and decision speed.
What the client keeps
- The production helpdesk
- The permission matrix
- Workflow and SLA configuration
- Pipeline code in their own repository
- Dashboards they can edit, and the metric definitions behind them