Automated service desk ups efficiency

Vector is an energy solutions business and the largest electricity distributor in New Zealand with 600,000 connections across the Auckland region. Vector businesses also provide air conditioning and other services. IT services for 1,300 people across all these business units are provided by Vector Digital Services, the IT business unit which employs about 200 people.

Vector serves more than half a million customers. It operates several business units including Vector Electricity, the largest national electricity distributor, OnGas, which supplies bottled gas, Vector Fibre, which provides optical fibre networks and Vector Technical Services.

IT services and support for all these businesses are provided by Vector’s business unit, Vector Digital Services. In the past 15 years Vector Digital Services has outsourced ITSM for its IT helpdesk, and its contract was due for renewal. This did not give Vector access to and control of data for its own operations which would enable it to gain meaningful insights and make improvements. In addition, Vector required stronger ITSM support for its move towards a DevOps operating model for building services in-house.

Vector identified ServiceNow® as a best of breed ITSM platform and selected Fujitsu to implement it, recognising Fujitsu’s expertise and long partnership with ServiceNow.

Fujitsu had just 13 weeks to implement ServiceNow ITSM and build a new service desk management support system. This involved automating IT support, previously provided by an external contact centre, with a new service desk that utilises Virtual Agent to connect to a live chat queue, report issues and check on existing ticket status. Phone support is now available only to a limited number of staff with mission-critical requirements.

“When you have the right partner it’s amazing what you can do in a very short period of time,” says Rachelle Mortimer-King, Transformation and Service Manager at Vector. “We delivered a working platform with people, process workflows and multiple catalogues. We completed it by the date we said we would, and that required the right partner.”

Mortimer-King adds: “Not only were we on a compressed timeframe, but the quality of the data we had to work with was poor. So, there was a significant amount of work the team had to do to gather the data we needed to build the system.”

ServiceNow ITSM has enabled Vector to greatly increase the ef ficiency of its IT
support. It now has well-defined service catalogues that not only aid self-service to find resolutions, but also when a person logs an incident it can be directed automatically to the appropriate resolver group without needing to be manually triaged. Furthermore, it has provided valuable insights into the type and volume of IT support requests, and support that is provided informally through personal contacts.

“ServiceNow ITSM has given us visibility into the type and volume of work that goes to the various teams. It also shows where operational work may be going but does not flow through the system,” Mortimer-King explains.

In the future, ServiceNow will support the automation of onboarding and of fboarding users, the approval flow for account creation, modification and suspension, and will automate responses to more popular service requests.