Date Published March 27, 2018 - Last Updated December 13, 2018
Marsh & McLennan Companies was a finalist for HDI’s 2018 Team Excellence Award.
Learn more!
With more than 65,000 colleagues in 100 countries, Marsh & McLennan Companies (MMC) is comprised of four operating companies—Marsh, Guy Carpenter, Mercer and Oliver Wyman—and a corporate center.
Marsh & McLennan Global Technology Infrastructure (MGTI) manages the company’s technology environment and delivers a wide range of services to MMC’s employees around the world. This includes computing and service desk support, maintaining data centers, managing the firm’s local and wide area networks, Internet connectivity, email, and telephony.
The MGTI Service Desk team consists 
of 114 analysts located in 9 locations around the world. Our team handles approximately 550,000 contacts from MMC colleagues per year utilizing a 24x7x365 follow-the-sun process.
Expansion of the MGTI Service Desk
We currently offer 24x7x365 support for colleagues in North America, Continental Europe and Middle East, Australia and New Zealand, Africa, Poland, Portugal, and Brazil. Over the past three years, we have been working to onboard first-line support teams with a key objective of extending the 24x7x365 support offering globally, including France, Germany, Asia, and India.
We have encountered many challenges throughout this project as we have embraced new languages and cultures into our environment. Not to mention the growth of the service desk personnel by 19 analysts and the inclusion of satellite service desks into one, centralized, global tier 1 support model.
Welcoming such a diverse group of analysts from nine different countries, speaking nine different languages has been extremely rewarding and has greatly enriched our global team. However fulfilling, this has been an extremely challenging transition, requiring a lot of our time and focus.
To overcome these challenges and achieve success, we have been partnering closely with multiple stakeholders, primarily the local support teams, to proactively prepare for each transition and instill confidence in our processes and controls. Regular service reporting has been essential to our success, as it gives both parties opportunities to adjust processes and services as needed to best service our colleagues.
Multi-Language Live Chat
After a review of our colleagues’ ability to contact the service desk 24x7x365 worldwide, we decided we could improve our “help anywhere, help anytime” model. Having considered all available options, we decided to leverage new functionality to onboard five additional languages to our 24x7x365 live chat support offering.
To avoid the expense of providing native speaking support, we enabled automated machine translation technology for French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Italian and are planning to onboard additional languages, including Polish, Turkish, Korean, Mandarin, and Japanese.
Machine translation requires careful attention while building and maintaining rules and glossaries and additional support personnel training to ensure chats can be successfully translated (i.e., simplifying sentences and eliminating colloquialisms and abbreviations). However, it has enabled us to provide our worldwide customers with better 24x7 support, and each new language added has been met with enthusiasm and appreciation from our colleagues.
This project has been a great success! Multi-language chat functionality has offered access to 24x7x365 service desk support across 19 countries (Brazil, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, Columbia, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, Canada, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Panama, Argentina, and Chile).
Support for an additional 3,675 colleagues has been absorbed by existing GSD resources and aligns firmly with our tier 1 support centralization strategy.
Translated chat service allows us to deliver value-added tier 1 service in countries where tier 1 support demand was handled via local support teams during local business hours only.
Increased Efficiency and Cost-Effectiveness via Live Chat
As part of our continued efforts to increase efficiency and cost-effectiveness, we are focusing on moving incident creation from email and phone to live chat. Unlike email and phone, chat allows analysts to assist two to three colleagues at a time with greater customer satisfaction. Chat is also growing as the preferred contact method amongst our colleagues who can now reach us on- or off-network 24x7x365 in six languages.
We have invested time and effort in enhancing training for our analysts to make sure that support provided via live chat is fast and clear. Providing colleagues with a superior experience every time they use chat has helped drive repeat usage.
We have had great success and live chat has now exceeded phone as our top entry methodology to our service desk.
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