In 2020 defi SOLUTIONS embarked on a journey to digitally transform its team member, global partner, and client service experiences. This journey aligns with a company-wide initiative for continuous improvement that also pervades the development and delivery of current and future defi SOLUTIONS products and services.
With the merger of the former Sagent Auto and defi SOLUTIONS, we found ourselves faced with several bespoke tools that were expensive to operate, lacked integration with other corporate systems, and were used with varying degrees of success. Even though our user communities had similar support needs, they existed in multiple ecosystems and presented fragmented user experiences.
As we’ll show in the following, our efforts resulted in Help Desk reductions in:
- Phone call wait times
- Phone calls in favor of the defi SUPPORT Service Portal
- Time to deliver Service Catalog Requests
- Phone calls for password reset and unlock
We’re sharing these details of our experiences in hopes that our ideas might also help you transform your processes and bring needed support and relief to your teams and business partners.
The Business Case
We started with a business case that focused on five key qualities:
- Usability: To drive user engagement through a thoughtful design experience
- Extensibility: To support sophisticated integrations into operational areas of our business
- Efficiency: To focus on process and automation through advanced workflows
- Flexibility: To scale the solution as necessary and ensure the solution is location agnostic
- Affordability: To manage operating expense
Our digital transformation journey wasn’t intended to provide an immediate shift from one state to another. We knew the desired destination would take time to arrive at, but we needed the ability to move faster, make better decisions to drive successful outcomes, and put a user’s mindset front and center. We determined one way to achieve this was via digital workflows.
Digital workflows bring together the expansive, varied services offered to users in an interface that is effortless and consistent. Focusing on services rather than technology allowed us to create a “single pane of glass” view into the health of our internal and commercial systems and increase operational support efficiency. One potential partner became a clear front-runner with their focus on digital workflow optimization. We recommended ServiceNow. Our Board agreed with us. And we got to work.
Delivery Phases
Our next step was to begin framing delivery phases for a digital transformation roadmap that took us through the end of 2022. After considerable collaboration between our teams and ServiceNow, we arrived at these:
- Phase 1: Building a solid foundation
- Phase 2: Base integrations and product extension
- Phase 3: Sophisticated integrations supporting automation and hardware and software insights
- Phase 4: Operational maturity
Phase 1 (2020-2021): Building a solid foundation
Our initial focus was on establishing base functionality to support defi’s ITSM and CSM practices and construction of a Customer Service Portal for clients and an internal Service Portal for team members and global partners. This would allow us to migrate our entire user community into a single solution and deprecate legacy systems to offset the cost of the new solution.
In the first 4 months we stood up ITSM and CSM practices to support our first client in Microsoft Azure, followed by a migration of 129 clients in June and all internal team members and global partners on August 10, 2020.
To ensure continuity in the user experience, we also migrated 3500+ records from legacy systems.
Phase 2 (2021-2022): Base integrations and product extension
With defi SUPPORT live, we shifted focus to bi-directional integration with Microsoft Teams, growing defi KNOWLEDGE and driving Service Portal adoption. Additionally, we stood up an integration with our HRIS system and Microsoft Active Directory to drive onboarding and off-boarding automation for team members and global partners.
We accomplished the following:
- Obtained approval on a data management strategy that would extend use of ServiceNow, consuming Time Sheet Management and Project Portfolio Management (PPM) modules to align with Resource and Demand Management business processes and improve dashboard reporting
- Deployed Hardware Management and Software Asset Management (SAM) modules to begin team member and global partner capture
- Began focusing on the adjacent support ecosystem for team members and global partners by launching a best-in-class password self-reset and unlock solution via the defi SUPPORT Service Portal
Phase 3 (Jan – Aug 2022): Sophisticated integrations supporting automation and hardware/software insights
Finally in a position to take off the training wheels, we approached 2022 with a focus on increasing the comprehensiveness of our integrations to support major incident on-call notifications, automated license provisioning and deprovisioning in SAM, and hardware and software cost of ownership.
We additionally:
- Deployed mobile applications, which further extend the reach of our solutions
- Matured our use of Visual Task Boards to optimize our defi SUPPORT development practice
- Continued extension our adjacent support ecosystem so that team members had access to a best-in-class password manager and vault solution
Phase 4 (Aug – Dec 2022): Operational maturity
What will we do the remainder of this year? Let’s break it down:
- Focus on continuous workflow and automation improvements to mature existing processes
- Optimize an integration with a best-in-class reporting and data visualization tool to aid defi’s data analytics practice and update to a Next Experience UI that will deliver an even more intuitive, personalized experience to drive engagement and productivity
- Optimize our ITSM CMDB through the activation of automated discovery of on premises and cloud infrastructure
The Results
While the digital transformation journey at defi is still very much a work in progress, the results we’ve already experienced solidify the selection of ServiceNow and our team’s ability to execute an agenda steeped in delivering for team members and global partners.
- 95% reduction in HelpDesk phone call wait times
- 69% reduction in monthly HelpDesk phone calls in favor of defi SUPPORT Service Portal
- 64% reduction in time to deliver Service Catalog Requests
- 10% reduction of HelpDesk phone calls through use of a best-in-class password self-reset and unlock solution representing 1539 calls and resulting in 770 hours of time saved
Our ability to minimize the impact to internal productivity directly benefit our ability to support and service clients, a key priority of defi SOLUTIONS for 2022 and beyond.