The Need to Innovate a 10-Year-Old IT Ticketing System

Stephen Peatling, Manager of Customer Engagement, and his team of 43 IT professionals, have full plates. They're responsible for both face-to-face and remote assistance, which includes the client services desk and support desk. On top of that, they also assist the university with audio visual services and VIP training and support.

One of the first things Stephen noticed upon arriving at Victoria University was the legacy HEAT service management system. The HEAT system had been installed about 10 years earlier, but, according to Stephen, the university was only employing it as an IT ticketing system, with no significant improvements or innovations added since.

He explains that to enter a ticket, customers either had to call the service desk or send an email and then that email would be copied and pasted into the ticketing system. But every time IT touched a job in the ticketing system, it'd send an email to the customer.

Updating to the modern Ivanti Service Manager solution

Ivanti Service Manager offers the functionality and flexibility IT departments need to improve their service levels — dramatically reducing wait times, transfer rates and abandoned calls. Available in the cloud or on-premise, the solution offers multiple, easily accessible self-service channels to increase productivity of end-users and IT staff. 

Stephen Peatling says his IT team had a great relationship with the university’s staff members, “however the customer experience of our students was really poor. Over that year I tried to change the culture to say, ‘a customer is a customer no matter what’, and that we had to set up our systems to advise the customer —not a ‘staff member’ and not a ‘student’ — but a customer.”

Among the feedback received was a request for new templates — not just words on a screen. The team responded by creating new, concise templates, broken into sections for easier reading. This effort included colour-coding status of the service request: green for “complete”; yellow, indicating an “update”; red if there’s still a ‘major issue”.

“Within the first few months of implementing the feedback through new templates, etc., the feedback we received was, well, no feedback,” Stephen says. “From our customers’ perspective we made massive change, and this would be the way we’d communicate moving forward.”

Improved customer experience and a tool that other departments want to be a part of.

Since implementing Ivanti, Victoria University has been able to:

• Jump their IT’s Net Promoter Score from around 54% to 60% to 90%.
• Receive the “Most Improved Student Services” award.
• Shift to total online instruction in less than a week.
• Convince more IT teams to use Ivanti Service Manager.

Improving your service relationship with customers requires a tool like Ivanti Service Manager

“It’s been an amazing transformation story,” says Stephen. “All it really took was making sure that we had the right setup within Service Manager, that we could see the data through Xtraction and then really promote a customer service-focused result.”

_{Note: A customer’s results are specific to its total environment/experience, of which Ivanti is a part. Individual results may vary based on each customer’s unique environment.}