Enabling best practice service management at Sabio

Customer Management spoke with Paul Moore, Head of Support Services at Sabio, about how using FrontRange’s ITSM IT management solution has helped Sabio to strengthen its Intelligent Support offering for UK contact centre operators.

First of all Paul, tell us a little about Sabio and its position in the marketplace.

Sabio is an innovative contact centre services company that focuses on delivering exceptional customer contact strategies and solutions. We offer a broad range of business consulting, systems integration and managed services, and have worked with many major organisations across the UK including egg, Enterprise Rent-a-car, ING Lease, Newport City Council, Leeds City Council, Pitney Bowes, Scottish Widows, Sky, The Student Loans Company, Travelex and Yorkshire Building Society.

Sabio offers an Intelligent Support service to contact centre customers that goes beyond traditional reactive approaches to offer real-time proactive support for all of an organisation’s contact centre systems and applications.

How did Sabio first get involved with FrontRange?

Sabio had already been using an earlier generation service management system, so we had a good understanding of the market and what was available. A team of our support professionals had also worked on a major managed services contract where the customer used another FrontRange solution – Heat – which is a sister product of ITSM.

We looked at a number of different available applications but soon realised that the FrontRange solution was the most flexible service management offering and the one that could best support our Intelligent Support strategy. We met with FrontRange at this year’s Service Desk Exhibition at Olympia, visited existing customers who were very positive about the application, and so we made the decision to implement a solution based on FrontRange ITSM.

What were the key challenges and business drivers you were facing at that time?

Today’s contact centre technology solutions have become more and more sophisticated, and we’re finding that the complexity and levels of integration now being deployed within the contact centre are continuing to increase in line with the growing importance and value that organisations are placing on their customer-facing operations.

At Sabio we’re deeply involved in the challenge of supporting these complex solutions and applications, and addressing the operational issues of how to support customers with multiple technologies, multiple sites, multiple contracts and multiple service level agreements. As an organisation we are committed to extending and enhancing our service approach, and to provide our customers with the support skills and contract flexibility they increasingly require.

Our knowledge, understanding and ability to provide an unrivalled service for a complex contact centre technology environment is supported by our highly skilled and experienced support team, backed by comprehensive but simple processes based around the ITIL service methodology. We have also developed an innovative proactive support application – Sabio Intelligent Connect engineering (ICe) – that goes beyond traditional reactive support to provide customers with the security that comes from the live monitoring, proactive checking, alerting and reporting of both technical and operational performance across all of their key contact centre technology platforms.

ICe offers a very innovative approach to supporting our client’s solutions. The combination of our ICe system alerting the Sabio Support Centre, together with the accuracy of the available information around the affected area, allows our support team to prevent incidents before they start to impact service levels. ICe has really turned our support model on its head by enabling Sabio to be in a position where we can now inform our client when an incident has occurred.

A key driver behind our Intelligent Support approach is the recognition that different contact centre systems and applications interoperate with each other, and that potential issues in one area – the ACD, for example - are quite likely to have an impact on another technology component such as Workforce Optimisation systems. Our goal is to provide customers with visibility across their entire contact centre technology estate, and that instead of just focusing on whether the hardware is working or not, we can also provide organisations with operational and application checks so that they can manage their centres from a business perspective.

How are you working with FrontRange to meet those challenges?

FrontRange’s ITSM solution is now an important component of our overall service offering as it provides an ongoing platform for delivering our support services and ensuring that we follow the processes we’ve adopted from the ITIL framework. Because FrontRange ITSM is modular we could implement only those modules that we needed for our support business, while its standards-based approach meant we could create a dedicated interface between ITSM’s Incident Management module and our Sabio Intelligent Connect (ICe) live monitoring system.

Now, when an incident is reported from within ICe, it is automatically logged in FrontRange ITSM, which automatically raises a ticket and assigns that incident to our service desk. This gives the team the information they need to start working on the resolution straight away.

We were also impressed by FrontRange ITSM’s flexibility. The complex nature of the contact centre environment, with differing Service Level Agreements depending on the technology and its criticality to the business, and with each of our customers requiring a custom support service, meant we needed both a sophisticated solution and the flexibility to customise it to our business needs. FrontRange ITSM was the only support management application that could provide us with the level of flexibility we needed.

What are the key benefits that Sabo is gaining from its use of the FrontRange ITSM solution?

Although it’s still early in the project’s implementation, we’re already seeing noticeable improvements in our overall service delivery, contract management and in the development of our support knowledge base.

One of the key benefits for Sabio is that we’ve now got a tool in place that drives our support processes based on the ITIL framework. While these processes were all in place before we deployed FrontRange ITSM, we’ve now automated their management, freeing up valuable staff time, giving us more flexibility with our support resources, and making sure that we’re better placed to respond to critical support situations.

In addition to deployment at our Support Centre in Glasgow, we’re also finding ITSM a valuable tool for our field engineers who can now log in to the system and update tickets, even when they’re working remotely at a customer site.

The tight integration of FrontRange ITSM with Intelligent Connect (ICe) is starting to deliver significant operational efficiencies, speeding up the support process and allowing us to get to the end goal of resolution more quickly.

FrontRange ITSM has also provided more comprehensive reporting than we had before enabling us to identify performance improvements within our support centre much faster, which means we can implement changes to improve customer service much quicker.

What are the people at the Sabio Support Centre in Glasgow saying about FrontRange and its support of your ITIL process operations?

According to Sabio’s Support Centre Manager, Caroline Carroll, using FrontRange ITSM has helped her team to achieve a faster turnaround for logged calls, particularly for known issues that are now easier to manage and track using the knowledge base. This translates directly into a quicker resolution for our customers.

“The team has also found that ITIL procedures are easier to follow – it’s a lot easier if there’s a structured framework in place that is driven by the system – and this has again resulted in a more efficient outcome for our customers, especially with rigorous adherence to correct escalation procedures and better feedback on individual cases.

“Thanks to FrontRange ITSM, our support staff are confident that they have the right information in place at the right time to address service issues.

How critical is the relationship to your business and how do you see it developing in the future?

We believe that FrontRange ITSM is now embedded as a key technology platform for Sabio’s Intelligent Support offering. We meet regularly with the FrontRange team to help us fine-tune the application to our business requirements and to find out the latest developments in the solution.

We’re currently reviewing the latest release of the ITIL methodology, version 3, and identifying which components are applicable for the Sabio Intelligent Support model. This is an ongoing process for us, but we’ll be particularly interested in Version 3’s focus on the importance of creating business value rather than just the execution of processes.

FrontRange ITSM will help us to continue to operate at the forefront of the market, delivering increasingly sophisticated support solutions to meet our customers’ changing business and service needs.