LEARN HOW VIVANTIO’S INTEGRATION CAPABILITIES REALLY COMPARE.

When considering possible ITSM tools, one key element to consider is how well each product will integrate with your available resources to provide a seamless IT organization. With so many options out there, it can be difficult to determine what will work best for your team. In order to see how our product compares, Vivantio participated in a SIAM group test that was run by The ITSM Review. The ITSM Review is an IT community that focuses on sharing knowledge about various tools out there that are available to professionals. But, what is a SIAM group test exactly? Let’s explain.

WHAT IS A SIAM GROUP TEST?

SIAM (service integration and management) is a framework for managing multiple suppliers of IT services and integrating them to provide a single, business-facing IT organization.

In other words, SIAM is all about joining all of your IT tools – email, systems monitoring, development tracking, notification services, etc. – into one unified hub, saving your service team time and money while never losing out on important data.

THE RESULTS ARE IN

Vivantio took part in the Group Test and garnered some high praise.

“What really impressed me about Vivantio was their dedication to making life easier for beleaguered Ops and Supplier Managers,” wrote Vawns Murphy, senior ITSM analyst for ITSM Review parent Enterprise Opinions and author of the study. “The use of technology to not only support integration but also automate pre-defined responses to ticket event, really makes this a strong contender in the tools universe.”

“The Vivantio ethos is to deliver flexible, reliable, trusted ITSM software to empower the delivery of service excellence to the customer organisation. From the product demonstration, this ethos was clear to see as the flexibility of the product spans interfaces from everything; from Microsoft to Google,” Murphy goes on to write.

For the full results of the SIAM Group Test, visit The ITSM Review.

TECH EXPERTS AT PC MAG TAKE NOTE OF VIVANTIO'S INTEGRATION CAPABILITIES.

If you’re familiar with our platform, you already know that flexibility is a big theme for Vivantio. This theme ties directly into our platform’s approach to integrations. The Vivantio Platform is a workhorse in IT service management in its own right. But, the typical service team may utilize dozens of different tools in day-to-day operations, making it imperative that the Platform work in-sync with all the pieces in your service ecosystem.

LEARN DIRECTLY FROM THE EXPERTS AT PCMAG

PC Magazine published a great piece on taking the Vivantio Platform’s functionality to the next level by integrating with key outside tools.

Read the full story here: 4 Integrations for a More Powerful Vivantio Experience.

HOW IMPORTANT IS UPTIME IN ITSM?

As often as we preach the importance of streamlining recurring ITSM processes and speeding up the delivery of core offerings, nothing grinds customer service to a halt quite like a platform outage.

You might recall the massive 2014 Google outage, which left 10 percent of the behemoth’s customers locked out of Gmail, Google+ and other services for nearly an hour in the middle of the US workday. This from a company that typically boasts 99.9% uptime.

While this is an extreme case and rare on Google’s part, it punches home the importance of high availability and proves that uptime percentage is more than just a figure for sales to throw around. In ITSM software, high availability is crucial.

WHAT AFFECTS ITSM SOFTWARE UPTIME?

One big factor that can either bolster or hamper IT service management software uptime is a vendor’s choice of hosting partner.

Tier One hosts employ significant measures at each of their massive data centers, capable of operating day-to-day with zero outages and prepared to handle more catastrophic challenges posed by natural disaster or external attack with minimal downtime.

Other issues with downtime arise from the design of certain ITSM platforms themselves. A vendor should be able to add customers and expand and alter their system without bringing it down. Platforms designed without extensibility and scalability in mind often crumble under the weight of a growing user base, and no one utilizing the tool is spared the headaches.

Anyone who regularly depends upon tools like Microsoft Azure knows this all too well.

But it’s not just unplanned outages that hamper customer service capabilities: scheduled updates to an ITSM platform can cause problems if the timing of such updates are suspect, if such updates happen far too often, if downtime during updates drags on longer than planned or, worst of all, news of upcoming update outages isn’t communicated to you, the user of the tool.

IS ITSM SOFTWARE DOWNTIME AVOIDABLE?

Simply put; no.

Downtime is inevitable. No matter how much money, time and effort is spent on high availability, it’s just that – high, not guaranteed.

The real key is how ITSM vendors deal with outages, what stopgaps are put in place to limit unplanned downtime and how readily they keep customers looped in to service updates.

Vivantio maintains a dashboard with live updates on both planned and unplanned outages and a log of updates and fixes. With a comprehensive log in hand, it’s impossible for ITSM vendors to hide from their own service record.

WHAT’S ACCEPTABLE UPTIME FOR ITSM VENDORS?

99.5% uptime, excluding planned maintenance, is an acceptable level for an ITSM platform. Any lower than that and you’re dealing with a tool that isn’t dependable enough to make up for even steep cost savings. Steer clear.

Perhaps most importantly, the uptime for your service management software should exceed your organization’s own internal requirements. If the tools you use to deliver a stellar customer experience don’t pass muster, your team’s own delays and frustration will be passed along directly to the customer.

LOOKS CAN MATTER WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR SELF-SERVICE PORTAL.

Most companies already recognize the importance of aesthetics and user experience in their corporate websites, as they are key to winning new business. What can often get overlooked is that a self-service portal is essentially an extension of the website. A self-service portal is all about servicing and retaining business, both key factors for any company. Let’s what elements impact the look and feel of your self-service portal and how they can have serious impacts on the health of your business.

WHAT GOES INTO A GREAT LOOKING SELF-SERVICE PORTAL?

A self-service portal is the “shop window” for any service management team’s customers. This can include internally or externally supported users. It represents your professionalism, branding and competence in dealing with your customer’s queries and issues and, as an important customer service touchpoint, is paramount to starting the process off on the right foot.

A self-service portal is meant to provide a stellar customer experience to your end-users, reduce the total number of inbound service calls and ease the load on your team so you have more time to resolve issues and close tickets.

When your portal looks and feels completely foreign to your brand, it’s unlikely to achieve any of this. At Vivantio, we work with hundreds of service desks who manage a self-service portal. From that experience, we’ve long recognized the value of self-service modules and how the design elements within have an impact on the overall service experience for an end-user. It’s important to account for organizational branding elements like photos and colorways. You also will probably need to make small visual tweaks to your portal design such as color changes in select areas or the addition of a company logo.

With the right tools in place, your service team can control your portal’s look and feel.

CONCLUSION

A great self-service portal provides value not only to your business but, perhaps more importantly, to your customers. It can provide users with a central location where they can research their own problems with rich content like self-help guides, videos, and FAQs. Your users can also see the status of services, all under the umbrella of your company’s unique branding.