Saving $30,000 and a quick implementation improves "access" and efficiency at this prestigious university.

In late 2019,  Wake Forest University (WFU) was faced with a problem. The company providing their service management platform wanted to start charging an additional $30,000 year for new servers. The director of the Physical Security Technology and Deacon One Card office (PSTDOC) decided that perhaps now was a good time to find a new solution and asked administrator David Cowan to head up the search. 

He immediately went searching for other options while agreeing to a one-year grace period with the current solution provider which would end on Dec 1, 2020. Hampered by the pandemic, David diligently researched different vendors and tried out several possibilities. The idea was to replicate Wake Forest’s system as quickly as possible with a look towards future expansion including a massive inventory asset project without incurring a massive price tag.

He needed a provider that could save Wake Forest money, integrate easily with their existing system, and implement quickly once approved.

The solution for WFU was Vivantio. 

“Vivantio’s team would walk me through steps and offer multiple solutions to where I was comfortable knowing we can make it work,” David explained, “I’d say one of the key reasons we went with Vivantio was because of their people.”

Click below to read the whole case study and discover how quickly David's team was able to implement a new solution and tackle an impressive inventory project that would save countless hours and drive efficiency throughout the university. 

 

Self-service offers customers a great opportunity to interact with your service teams in a way that works best for them.  And self-service portals offer customers access to information with a click of button and has shown to streamline business practices, improve service efficiency and (even better) increase customer satisfaction. 

But sometimes users need help in determining where to go or what to do inside their SSP especially when it comes to logging tickets.  It just makes sense to offer them a little "guidance."   And so, Vivantio now offers Guided Categories  - a new intuitive and visually pleasing way to help users log tickets in the proper category. 

Essentially, Guided Categories are an easy way to enable a service catalog on your SSP.  Being gently guided to the right category may also reduce both the number of tickets raised and the overall time it takes to resolve queries. And, of course, you can always allow the end user to log a ticket without a listed category.

Example of Guided Categories

For example, let’s say a user has an issue with finding their network printer. Based on how you want to set up those initial categories, the user could navigate to (for example) the INCIDENT CATEGORY panel and then a subcategory of PRINTER and finally CAN’T FIND NETWORK PRINTER. The user can also provide additional text information to help assist the support team in troubleshooting the issue.

With Vivantio’s highly configurable software, you can offer a number of category selections, colors, images and options during set up. Create a pleasing palette of options for your users with unique icons or images that are specific to your branding. 

Guided Categories represent another product enhancement available to Vivantio users at no additional cost.  Discover for yourself why so many customers rate Vivantio best value and schedule your personal demo today!

 

Are you ready to elevate your CX?  We have an easy way for you to experience the award-winning Vivantio platform with no obligation, no phone calls and no email.  It's our free self-guided tour that shows you how to: 

• configure your self-service portal
• navigate the user interface, ticketing and key features
• benefit from custom dashboard, reporting and more! 

Discover the Vivantio difference at your own pace and get ready to elevate your customer experience. 

 

 

Vivantio provides a comprehensive suite of SaaS service management products that cover multiple customer service areas including IT ticketing, help desk, service desk, IT service management, asset management and enterprise service management, all backed by proven industry frameworks, such as ITIL.

With Vivantio, companies can manage incoming email, track messaging histories, route tickets to the right teams or employees, escalate critical issues, conform with scheduling, prioritize tickets and integrate with other service tools – all powerful, automated actions designed to increase efficiency across companies’ service teams.

Check out the free tour or better yet, schedule your own personal demo and get one step closer to delivering breakthrough customer service. 

You've heard them before. You might have even thought it yourself at one time.  But be on the lookout for these 5 Customer Service fallacies ready to sink the unwary when thinking about a service management solution. 

1. "We're not really in the service business."

The term “service business” is going the way of terms like “internet-based business” or “online retail”—that is to say, the distinction is becoming irrelevant! The new reality is, every business is a “service business” today—even traditional companies in industries like healthcare and energy/utilities are rapidly acknowledging their roles in co-creating value with their customers.

2. "B2B Customers don't need a lot of fancy self-service options."

If you’re measuring what’s at-risk in economic/bottom-line terms, it’s clear to see that the risks of not prioritizing customer service are significant. B2B companies are often held to a higher standard across the board, as individual customers have a sense of their financial importance to your business. Service improvements in everything from telecommunications (the first mobile phones) to logistics (overnight document delivery) were spearheaded by the B2B economy, and customer service is no different. Thanks to the easy availability of information regarding alternate suppliers and the ubiquity of customer reviews, the stakes are higher than ever for providing great service—great value as your customers define it.

3. "Providing more self-service is out of our reach (and probably unnecessary anyway)."

In a recent survey of 1,000 B2B decision makers, lack of speed in interactions with their suppliers emerged as the number one pain point, mentioned twice as often as price. And digital solutions loom large in executives’ thinking as a way to make routine tasks more efficient. Some 86 percent of respondents said they prefer using self service tools for reordering, rather than talking to a sales representative.

4.“We could never get all our key systems linked to Customer Service without a huge IT investment.” 

You don’t have to overhaul your enterprise systems or leave yourself at the mercy of pricey consultants to benefit from a “Unified Service Management Platform” like Vivantio. With robust “out of the box” capabilities, Vivantio allows your team to configure processes, rather than solutions that require extensive custom coding. With a Unified Service Management Platform, you can give your CS team deep visibility into adjacent business data that lets them respond and resolve issues exponentially faster.

5. "We'd be better off investing our resources in finding new customers." 

The numbers say no. There is much greater ROI in keeping your customers happy. To start with, when it comes to sales, the probability of selling to an existing happy customer is up to 14x higher than the probability of selling to a new customer. Harvard Business Review says customers who had the best past experiences spend 140% more compared to those who had the poorest past experience.

Want to chart a better course?

Vivantio has been helping clients optimize their service organizations by leveraging a unified service management platform that help you avoid major Customer Service disasters. Learn more on how Service Optimization can benefit your business exponentially. 

Or even better, how about a brief, no-obligation, demo?

Delivering good service is more challenging now than ever before: there are more questions being asked and fewer people available to answer them. Technology has risen to the challenge: Zoom stock has soared, Microsoft has been announcing new features in Teams, and yes, Netflix has been there to snatch us up when we step away from our desks.

Vivantio’s own account management / customer success team have been busy reaching out to customers to see how best we can help. A common theme among the responses has been, “How can we get more out of self service?” either from customers who aren’t using a Self Service Portal yet, or who are using it but not as much as they’d like to.

It made sense to us. With resources at an all-time low, we expected our customers to turn toward Self Service to help keep their service levels up. Wanting to find out more, we dove into our analytics, and the results weren’t quite what we expected.

The Results

Use of Self Service is at an all-time low among Vivantio customers.

Throughout 2019, the percentage of tickets opened via Self Service across the Vivantio SaaS platform stayed pretty constant – around 27% of tickets were opened via Self Service. Email accounted for 33-37% of tickets, with the remainder being opened manually via the Vivantio technician portal.

In March 2020, that dropped down to 23% – not a huge difference on paper, but to the customers impacted the most, that translates to over 5,000 extra phone calls, total. In one month! It looks like the trend may now be reversing – April rose about half a point on March – but it’s still early to tell.

You might have had an internal chat system in place already – Teams, Slack, something else – but it’s probably being used more than ever before. So now, you don’t even have to leave your desk to get hold of IT.

When we sat back and thought about this, we decided maybe it shouldn’t have been that surprising. We all know how easy it has historically been to walk over to your IT team and ask a question instead of logging a ticket. Your first thought might be, “Well, you can’t walk over to IT now, so they’ll have to use the ticketing system.”

Turns out, that’s not the case. You might have had an internal chat system in place already – Teams, Slack, something else – but it’s probably being used more than ever before. Now, employees don’t even have to leave your desk to get hold of IT.

So, what do you do? How do you get people back on to Self Service? Do you even want to get people back on to Self Service? Answering those questions is going to be the focus of our blog posts the next few weeks, with information on new/existing features, best practices, and tips and tricks.

In the meantime, how has this “new normal” impacted your service team’s day-to-day? Have you seen an uptick or a downturn in the use of self-service, or even other channels that weren’t at play pre-work-from-home? Drop us a line at info@vivantio.com or tweet us @Vivantio.

 

A GREAT SELF-SERVICE PORTAL HELPS BOTH CUSTOMERS AND SERVICE TEAMS ALIKE

Not only does a great self-service portal free up a service team’s time, but users also prefer it. As customers are given the tools to solve their own technical issues, the service team can focus on more strategic work that delivers greater impact to the service desk, such as automating and streamlining workflows.

 

It’s important to remember that the premise behind a self-service portal is that it’s providing a service. The customer still needs to see the value of using a portal, which means that their answers are findable, new information is regularly updated, and service teams assist customers if they cannot solve their problems alone.

Let’s jump in and have a look at the ways you can successfully get self-service up and running for your internal support team.

 

DEFINE WHAT SERVICES ARE APPROPRIATE FOR SELF HELP

Begin by identifying which services take up most of your technician’s time and pinpoint tasks that customers can fulfill on their own.

Through examining your service reporting, you can identify trends in your service data, such as the number of requests associated with a certain issue and sorted that metric by the average time it takes to complete each action. For example, you may discover that your team receives 5 requests a week on “Installing office 365 on my local machine” and determine that it takes 20 minutes on average to close this type of request. Rather than continuing to address the same request one by one, write a comprehensive article on how a customer can do this themselves to save your team 10 days of service work per year.

At first, this may seem like a small change, but think about how much time you are going to save when it comes to other time-consuming tasks such as replacing printer ink or toner cartridges, installing software drivers, or diagnosing the reason a laptop’s internet is down. Not only have you reduced the time it takes your service team to handle simple and repetitive requests, but you have also empowered your customers by teaching them new skills.

Striking a positive experience with your customers, it is not uncommon to find a majority turning to the self-service portal first rather than coming directly to the service team to solve their issues.

 

ENABLE THROUGH EDUCATION

Your self-service portal cannot be a successful support channel if customers do not understand its benefits over sending an email or calling the service desk.

When you implement the self-service portal, take time to utilize its capabilities in order to educate new users and promote self-help. You can do this by:

• Setting up a comprehensive knowledge base to promote user guides, help videos, and FAQs
• Creating a service catalog to set expectations on available services
• Setting up chat channels so customers can have immediate discussions with available technicians regarding their open tickets
• Alerting users when assets are unavailable, such as when a file service goes down
• Using conditional fields in your ticket submissions to capture specific information on the request type

After implementing these changes, you will find that the portal becomes the preferred method for customers to submit tickets because it saves them time.

 

USE DATA TO BENCHMARK THE SELF-SERVICE PORTAL

The most successful self-service portals incorporate scheduled reporting to analyze where continual improvements can be made. It is crucial that you use data to benchmark your self-service portal against other support channels.

For instance, how long does it take the technician to solve a request through email versus the portal? The portal provides a dynamic environment to capture specific information based on the issue type, while email only provides a subject and body. A service team technician may require additional information provided by the customer if submitted via email, which lengthens how long a ticket remains open.

As you continue to migrate your service to the self-service portal, compare the completion time, the number of exchanged emails, actions, escalations, and total ticket volume with your other support channels. There can also be other tools to help gauge success such as surveys and article rating systems, depending on what tools you are using to build your self-service portal.

 

CONCLUSION

Armed with a greater understanding of the benefits of the self-service portal, it is easy to see why offering a solution like this for your customers makes sense. Not only do self-service portals provide better customer service, but teams can also do so at reduced time and cost. Setting up a self-service portal conscientiously by properly customizing and implementing all its features can help elevate an organization’s reputation and brand and make their service teams’ lives a whole lot easier.

–

Jessica Barrett Halcom is a writer for TechnologyAdvice.com, with specializations in human resources, healthcare, and transportation. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and currently lives in Nashville, TN.

ARE YOUR CUSTOMERS ENGAGED?

With the levels of self-service provided by the likes of Amazon, ASOS, and Zappos, service desks are under mounting pressures to match their service levels, despite having fewer resources. In fact, The Service Desk Institute (SDI) has research that shows that a whopping 64% of service desk professionals keenly recognize this pressure and are ready to respond.

Yet, in an industry where technology is developing at a rapid pace, many service desks struggle to do self-service well. However, unlocking the potential of this technology can greatly increase service desk efficiency and customer experience.

 

LEARN FROM SELF-SERVICE EXPERTS

In partnership with SDI, Vivantio staged and recorded a webinar where you’ll hear about how self-service has been successfully used by real organizations to improve customer satisfaction as well as drive efficiency of the service desk.

In the webinar, Vivantio’s Helen Heyns will be sharing real customer stories and her industry expertise:

“The Self-Service portal (SSP) plays a key role in the customer experience; it’s the shop window and it represents your professionalism, brand and competence in dealing with your customer’s queries and issues. I would love to show you how a well-built self-service portal will improve the efficiency and performance of your teams and in turn increase organizational ROI.” – Helen Heyns, Senior Technical Consultant, Vivantio

From this webinar, you will learn:

• What a Self Service Portal is and how it works
• An array of Self Service Portal best practices
• The multitude of benefits a Self Service Portal brings to the service desk, to customers, and to the overall business ROI – if it’s done right
• Why investing in a new or improved Self Service Portal now can be a sound decision.

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.