The Customer:
Gloucestershire County Council (GCC) administers strategic local government services in Gloucestershire. They have a large IT department of around 140 agents, and the work they do ranges across emergency services, education, transport, environment, property and economy and health and social care.
The Challenge:
Prior to working with Unifii, management of GCC’s IT services and customer facing processes were carried out externally. The tool in place at the time was clunky and unintuitive in nature, causing this to have a detrimental effect on the team’s efficiency. This resulted in frustration amongst the team, and given the size of the IT department, it was a high-priority issue that needed to be addressed urgently. Other IT processes were able to be highly customised, so didn’t necessarily promote best practise.
Covid-19 had a dramatic impact on GCC’s IT processes: prior to lockdown the Projects and Programmes team and the ICT team rarely worked from home, and in the height of the pandemic, teams had to be onboarded remotely. A steep amount of adjustment was therefore required.
The main objective was to smoothly bring the organisation onto ServiceNow, so that the council could continue to offer their services with little to no disruption during the process. This was crucial as emergency services and schools take up most of their customer base, with the latter accounting for around 80%.
The Solution:
After deciding that the ServiceNow platform would be the ideal route to pursue, GCC found Unifii through G-Cloud Digital Marketplace. Unifii are officially recognised as a government-approved provider of cloud support and software services; buying through G-Cloud avoids long tenders and complex procurement processes, and so many of our public sector customers find us through this process. For more guidance on buying through G-Cloud, read our blog here.
Unifii implemented ServiceNow’s IT Service Management (ITSM) and Customer Service Management (CSM) suites for GCC; it made sense to onboard them onto ServiceNow with ITSM and CSM, as these products were likely to solve their immediate IT issues in a holistic way and build a solid foundation for a roadmap plan.
For ITSM, a standard implementation was carried out, with little to no specific requirements on top of Incident, Problem, Change, Request, Knowledge etc.; a typical ITSM implementation was necessary to help GCC where they were struggling with lack of automation, real-time reporting and efficiency.
Needless to say, the CSM project required an increased focus on GCC’s external customers. Unifii and GCC worked together on several different workshops to understand the client’s requirements. This procedure involved:
Looking at an OOTB (Out of the Box) case management instance, showing GCC how it works and making recommendations based on their needs, or what has worked for previous Unifii customers
Understanding how GCC’s customers were currently interacting with them, i.e., the % by email, % by phone etc.
Demonstrating how the CSM portal works, again to align with their requirements
Detailed data workshops to understand what was necessary to underpin the processes
The benefit of including workshops in the project delivery is that it allows the process to be accelerated - workshops reduce customers’ focus on what they are currently doing and allows them to better understand what they could be doing.
In terms of technical development, Unifii provided:
A bespoke security framework for sensitive information
A bespoke, external CSM portal – this is part of the ongoing roadmap plan (GCC wanted to priortise areas such as business comms and onboarding their customers in the education sector before moving on to their other customers)
Single sign-on ability
A challenge for the project was that GCC’s data was quite broken. For their desired outcome, the initial set of data unfortunately wasn’t in a consistent state – however given the tight deadlines, Unifii decided that the data would need more time to grow and improve organically. This is part of the customer’s ongoing roadmap for their relationship with ServiceNow.
Michelle Meehan, Principal Consultant at Unifii and Project Manager on the ITSM implementation, says: “The internal GCC project team were highly collaborative and responsive during some challenging times of transition, meaning that the implementations went as smoothly as possible!”
The Benefits
As a result of working with Unifii and the onboarding onto ServiceNow, GCC have seen over 8,000 first-time fixes since their go-live date. They have also had a steep increase in monthly incidents and requests resolved, which can be seen in the dashboard below:
GCC have also highlighted that reporting is far quicker and more proactive with their ServiceNow implementation, and that their system no longer require hours of explaining to staff who are unfamiliar with the platform. Timelines for both the ITSM and CSM implementations were tight, as GCC’s licenses with their previous provider were expiring within six weeks: this meant that pressure was high for Unifii, but both sides have reported that working together was a brilliant learning experience with satisfying outcomes.
For more details on how Unifii could help your business too, please contact one of the team here for your free consultation.
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