Aviation Service Desk Case Study: Scaling IT Support

Client Profile

Founded in 2004, our client is the first and only global private aviation company – flying heads of state, corporate leaders, entrepreneurs, and private individuals to more than 1,900 airports in 187 countries. Its fleet consists of more than 100 wholly owned, ultra-long-range business jets that can fly charter and prepaid customers between any two points – easily connecting enterprises to growth markets. In 2018, the client formed a holding company and acquired an on-demand charter flight company and online flight booking platform, enabling it to serve the entire spectrum of business aviation customers. It maintains more than 2,000 crew members and on-land employees worldwide, with major operations in Malta and England.

After acquiring the leading North American on-demand charter brand, the client needed to modernize and expand its IT support model to accommodate the new service and significantly larger volume of users. With a centralized platform that enabled on-demand customers to instantly book flights for anywhere at any time, 24/7 IT support was required to avoid flight delays.

Challenges included:

• Managing 24/7 support. Before the acquisition, the IT support schedule was predominantly geared toward Europe and Asia; now the client needed to provide full support for U.S. time zones. However, adding the proper 24×7 coverage and volume support in-house would be very costly – requiring the client to hire more than 11 agents in different time zones.
• Improving the user experience. Handling higher volumes. The number of users had just doubled after the acquisition.
• Tracking key IT metrics. Improving the user experience. The client’s current IT support was stuck in firefighting mode, with few formal processes and minimal resources working a limited schedule. Without live agents to triage and troubleshoot issues after-hours, too many tickets required escalation to on-call, management-level resources.
• Handling higher volumes. Standardizing IT first-contact support. Charter employees used a different method for contacting IT than the rest of the organization. There were also different tools for tracking and escalating issues. Standard operating procedures across both organizations were outdated or non-existent, without an IT best practices framework.
• Standardizing IT first-contact support. Tracking key IT metrics. The client needed a reliable mechanism for tracking critical metrics like ticket volumes and top incident and request areas. Without it, the client struggled to accurately plan IT resources or proactively identify and address recurring issues.

Auxis was hired as the client’s IT Global Help Desk Outsourcing partner, providing remote, 24×7, Level 1 first-contact support from its Nearshore Delivery Center in Costa Rica. Auxis replaced the client’s outdated, reactive approach with a modern High-Performance Service Desk, customizing a solution prepared to fully address existing and future end-user support challenges.

Standard processes and operating procedures were formalized and documented based on ITIL best practices. As a result, support processes became standardized across the entire organization – creating a scalable, service centric model with repeatable processes and clear escalation points that consistently delivered excellent service.

To ensure a smooth transition with minimal business disruption, Auxis migrated the client’s support operation to Costa Rica in two stages – starting with the parent operation and onboarding support for the charter acquisition in the second wave.

Auxis resources spent weeks preparing for the initial migration at the client’s operations center in Malta – setting up a new system for providing phone-based support, establishing connectivity and access to the client’s platform and tools, training service desk resources from different shifts, and more. The transition team remained engaged for about a month after the first go-live date, ensuring the service desk’s knowledge and procedures were properly calibrated to meet the client’s expectations.

“This is professionalism from top to bottom in Auxis. Whether it’s dealing with my global service desk supervisor on a daily basis or it’s dealing with the service desk agent. What we see is that professionalism and that willingness to help is what came across and really sold it for me for Costa Rica.” Global Head of IT & Application Support

Once the service desk was running smoothly, Auxis began a similar transition process for the charter brand. Two months later, the Auxis service desk was seamlessly providing standardized Level 1 support for the entire organization.

Auxis successfully supported the client’s business growth with a best-in-class, standardized, scalable, and cost-effective Level 1 IT service desk.

Key benefits included:

• 40%+ Cost Savings: With a predictable per-ticket fee model, the client achieved over 40% cost savings, compared to hiring the eleven in-house resources that would have been required to cover the same volume around-the-clock.