There’s a fine line between service desk automation that delivers a great customer experience and the type of automated responses that cause customer frustration. The focus of our IT Service Management team has always been about the former, accelerating response times, and escalating issues as quickly as possible to the Ergo experts who can solve them.
For many years we have been incrementally improving service desk engagements, our focus on customers driving the change. With our newly launched ITSM platform, Ergo Connect, we are giving our clients a taste of next-generation service functionality that provides the best of both world, access to knowledgeable staff and streamlined automation.
Faster response times
One part of it is system-driven automation, where routine and time-consuming processes around managing IT systems are completely automated. Some of it happens in the background, like system health checks and security patching, or service request fulfilment automation, where passwords and access can be reset without human intervention. But where clients really see a difference is when it comes to raising tickets.
Our incident management workflows, including ticket creation and assignment, are now fully automated. That means we route a security alert directly to the security team and bypass the Level 1 agent. No more delays as the person who acts on the ticket has to go through a manual process of finding the most appropriate person to escalate it to. It’s all done automatically.
The enabler for this is Ergo Connect, our new ITSM solution which is based on the Technology Provider Service Management (TPSM) platform from Service Now, developed specifically for the technology service provider vertical. Ergo are the only Managed Service Provider (MSP) in Ireland to have adopted this tooling from the market-leader in ITSM, which we have developed a programme of automation around to configure the platform to each client’s needs.
This also allows the introduction of the concept Incident swarming which is a new framework for service support organizations that explicitly reject the tiered L1-L4 system in favour of a model of networked collaboration.
- Advocates identify three fundamental problems with tiered service support, which can:
- Lead to cases bouncing from one team to another until a single team resolves the issue.
- Reduce opportunities for knowledge sharing.
- Lead to queues forming, which increases waste and resolution time.
- Swarming has no hierarchy and centres around technician collaboration. A technician owns the case to resolution, and others are encouraged to opt in to provide subject-matter expertise.
- Swarms are especially helpful to deal with critical incidents, tackle incidents that can be resolved quickly, or deal with a backlog.
- As self-service and automation shift support work to more complex issues, swarming can improve knowledge sharing, improve agility, and reduce new analyst training time.*
Pre-agreed escalation plans determine how exactly how an issue is handled, who is alerted, and how their response moves it forward to a faster resolution. A Priority 1 issue will be routed straight to a senior engineer, whereas in the past the first line of support would have had to evaluate the severity of the issue, which takes time and runs the risk of a less experienced agent making a mistake.
Keeping it human
For the Ergo ITSM team, the big benefit is that we spend less time on manual tasks that are repetitive, add little value to the customer experience and introduce the risk of human error.
Also, with a swarming model as outlined above we are able to get engineers to a high skill level in a shorter timeframe and redeploy people to more client-facing roles, because we know that dealing with human beings remains central to the service, particularly if an issue escalates.
Greater transparency is a big win. We build multiple dashboards to give visibility to everyone involved in a client account. The Technical Account Manager, for example, receives alerts automatically and has the power to promote an issue to a major incident. This in turn would bring the issue to the attention of all stakeholders, including the client team, making everyone aware of the severity of the incident.
The path to continual improvement is another big win, enabled by better access to data. Automation doesn’t just help Ergo Connect streamline RMM (Remote Management and Monitoring), it facilitates the collection and collation of data from incidents to better inform future troubleshooting and issue escalation.
Right now, the goal is to get an issue to the right person more quickly and achieve a faster resolution time. It’s all about increasing efficiency and improving service delivery, while reducing the risk of human error. But as our knowledge repository grows, so too will our predictive maintenance capabilities, being able to identify a problem before it becomes an issue that impacts system performance or leads to downtime. With Ergo Connect our ITSM will only evolve and improve to deliver continuous innovation for our clients as it matures.
Here’s a not to be missed event on “The Future of Service”
On behalf of Konversational, Ergo would like to extend an invitation to their upcoming Customer Contact Management Association (CCMA) event:
Venue: The Mayson Hotel, North Wall Quay, Dublin.
When: 7th June at 9.30 am
Konversational are ServiceNow customer workflow experts that Ergo partnered with to implement our ServiceNow portal – Ergo Connect. They are organising an event sponsored by the CCMA – Customer Contact Management Association, which is an authority on customer experience excellence in Ireland.
The event will cover how to deliver end-to-end customer experience and how to automate back-end processes, reduce customer turnaround times and improve service quality with ServiceNow.
Ergo will be there to talk about how Ergo are achieving this for their customers through the implementation of the ServiceNow platform with the assistance of our ServiceNow delivery partner Konversational.
