Vivantio enables seven fold productivity gain in Allegis Group Service Desk
Allegis Group switches to Vivantio Service Desk for improved ease of use
Europe, Australia and North America (March 07, 2008) –
Vivantio, the leading service desk software provider, has won a contract to supply the Vivantio Service Desk to the service desk department of staffing and recruitment company Allegis Group.
Neil Davies
Service Delivery Manager
Allegis Group
The department of seventeen staff, based in Allegis Group’s European headquarters in Winnersh, Berkshire, was looking for a service desk solution to replace an ageing Remedy system. Mr Neil Davies, service delivery manager, Allegis Group, explained the issues which led to a need to replace the old system:
“Calls had to be logged manually and then relevant staff informed of the job and asked to react. Understandably with this degree of manual reporting and communication, breaks in the chain were happening. Some calls weren’t being logged effectively and it was taking too long to resolve customer problems.
“Time delays in turn were creating a lot of additional customer calls chasing progress and this volume of calls was keeping our first line support staff away from key task of performing the fixes. This in turn was leading to inbound calls being passed onto our second line support team who were sometimes being forced into a position of dealing with problems that frankly they should not have had to deal with. There was frustration and lack of efficiency everywhere.”
After a year long process of investigation and piloting of competitor solutions, including Touchpaper and HEAT, Allegis Group chose Vivantio Service Desk On Demand. Allegis Group deployed Vivantio Service Desk to enable customers to email in queries and be automatically assigned a reference number, leading in turn to enquiry routing through to the relevant Allegis Group support contact, who then goes back to the customer in a timely fashion. The automatic assigning of enquiry reference numbers and ability to route queries rapidly to the right contact has cut resolution times and transformed the customer experience almost overnight.
Mr Davies continued:
“We also found customer call volumes dropped by as much as 70 per cent as they gained confidence through receipt of automated emails indicating progress of their enquiry. They are also able to go online and view the progress of their query through our systems now.”
Allegis Group found that they were able to push up productivity in the service desk team from handling an average of 150 calls per month to more than 1,000 calls per month with the same number of people. That is a sevenfold productivity gain in first line support which is very significant for any service delivery operation.”
Allegis Group simultaneously solved their business continuity and disaster recovery planning concerns by opting to use the Vivantio On Demand, a hosted offering, with the whole system being hosted offsite by Vivantio.
Mr Davies continues:
“If something happens to this building or to our computer systems here we have the certainty of knowing that as long as we can gain internet access we will be able to get to the Vivantio system and continue handling and resolving calls.”
The advantage of using the hosted or Software as a Service-based system means that remote access, whilst remaining totally secure, does not have to be accessed through sometimes unreliable Virtual Private Network (VPN) links so remote and home workers have been able to continue working and informing the right contacts of customer queries whilst on the move, via their PDAs or laptops.
Allegis Group has also been impressed by the reporting capability of Vivantio. It enables management to understand quickly how many calls have been handled; how many are resolved within Service Level Agreements. Vivantio’s reporting also offers the facility to check loading levels per operative.
Allegis Group has also found the built-in knowledge-base together with ‘known issues’ write-ups are great aids to resolving queries rapidly. It has also enabled a greater degree of self-service as this area of the system can be made available to relevant customers.
Mr Davies summarised:
“The watchword with Vivantio is ease-of-use and a passion to work with you to make sure the system is meeting your needs. We get very rapid reaction if we ask for new functionality. The savings have also been dramatic. What we might have spent in one week working with a competitor product we will spend in our first year working with Vivantio. It is easy to build a Return on Investment story given the very clear advances we have made in service delivery productivity. We are also finding that because the system is so intuitive I can perform changes such as adding new customers to the system without involving Vivantio at all. Even simple changes could involve hiring Remedy engineers out at £1,000 per day.
“Vivantio engineers were able to configure and populate the system very rapidly which meant that from making our decision to go with Vivantio to ‘go live’ took just 10 days. We literally turned off the old system within two weeks – it was an incredibly easy transition.”
Mr Russell Wiltshire, director, Vivantio Ltd, commented:
“Allegis Group has seen very clear productivity benefits from going with Vivantio rather than more cumbersome and expensive competitors. We offer our solution for onsite install and as a hosted service, giving customers complete flexibility. Allegis Group chose our hosted version because it created some additional operational advantages for them. We are finding that companies of all sizes are now coming to Vivantio for an easier, more flexible and more cost effective service desk solution.”
Following the success of this deployment, Allegis has since expanded its use of Vivantio Service Desk into other departments across the group.
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About Allegis Group
Allegis Group is a member of the Allegis Group Inc network of companies, one of the largest staffing firms in the world. Founded in 1983, Allegis Group is ranked the sixth largest in the world and the second largest in the United States. Currently, Allegis Group has over 80,000 active contractors, 8,000 internal employees, and nearly 250 office locations in Europe, the U.S, Canada and Puerto Rico. Allegis Group works with large national, international and global firms as well as local and regional companies in Europe.
As a staffing industry leader, Allegis Group provides outstanding IT, telecommuniactions, engineering and professional staffing services and technology services delivered with the best customer service in the business. Allegis Group comprises a group of specialty service companies including: Aerotek, TEKsystems, Stephen James Associates, MarketSource and Allegis Group Services.
About Vivantio Ltd
Vivantio is a specialist service desk software and Software as a Service provider. Vivantio provides an easy-to-deploy and use suite of service desk tools which are designed for their simplicity, whilst offering the functionality that service desk teams need to increase productivity through the automation of processes and the enabling of customer self-service. For more information please visit www.vivantio.com
For all UK media enquiries for Vivantio please contact
Russell Wiltshire
Tel: +44 (0) 1934 424 840
Email: enquiries@vivantio.com
Source: Vivantio