Customer Spotlight: 5 Employee Service Management Leaders that Use Samanage

Many IT departments have already taken the important steps of introducing automated workflows and driving employees to the service portal. If so, their service management strategy is probably thriving in IT. The next step is a HUGE opportunity to introduce the strategy throughout the entire organization. Pushing a unified employee service strategy throughout the organization is far from easy. It takes meticulous planning from IT leaders just to create a service portal and encourage employees to use it. ITSM vendors specifically dedicate implementation experts to make sure the service strategy rolls out effectively in IT a process they’ve had years to improve. This is where your IT leaders have the opportunity to take charge, driving business value for the entire organization. They know how to build service portals, automations for ticket routing and priority, service catalogs, and an effective change management process. IT leaders have the ability to empower department stakeholders in the organization by guiding them through this process, especially in building automated workflows.   Here are five IT leaders and SolarWinds^® Service Desk (formerly Samanage) customers that have helped equip other departments within their organization to use service management:

Yorkshire Water

“The key is that you need to show them the power...if you can understand what they need, help them build a form and process, they’ll see very quickly that you’re making their lives so much easier.” - Steve Blackburn, Continuous Improvement Analyst at Yorkshire Water

Yorkshire Water supports over 6,000 users through the service desk. Prior to Samanage, that meant a lot of support emails and a lot of difficulties tracking the work between departments. In an effort to track their work, streamlining service delivery, they started moving tickets from IT, health, finance, governance and compliance, and property calls into the system. During this transition, Blackburn and John Walton, Service Desk Team Leader, helped each department build workflows for their regular processes. They recognized that having a unified employee service strategy wasn’t only training new stakeholders on how to build workflows and processes, but providing employees with a positive experience for every request or support need is important as well.

Adler Planetarium

“We really want to emphasize the end user, or employee. The approvals are pretty versatile, so we use them for all kinds of interactions, even with non-agents. All they have to do is open an email on their phone or computer and click the ‘approve’ button.” - Chris Comerford, CIO at Adler Planetarium

When Adler Planetarium came to Samanage they needed a service desk solution, and the service catalog on the Samanage Service Platform provided the ideal vehicle to accomplish that. Soon they were expanding and taking advantage of the service catalog across different departments. Adler Planetarium’s enthusiasm for using technology in new ways and the IT team’s passion for simplifying operations have helped cut down service delivery time and improve employee satisfaction. They’ve already built a powerful workflow engine through the service catalog and are always looking for ways to improve service delivery.

EXOS

“The biggest thing is helping them envision the workflow they want to see.”  - Shvonne Craig, Director of IT Services at EXOS

EXOS saw an opportunity to start streamlining services for other departments in the organization. They added tech ops, operations, facilities, and procurement teams into Samanage to help give EXOS employees one place to go for support. The ability to build custom workflows, automate processes and approvals and set SLAs are advantages to any new service providers, but Shvonne realized the need to take the lead to set them up. She gave a one-hour crash course on Samanage to new departments and stakeholders, helping them create the workflows and service catalog items as they communicated service needs. Shvonne took the time to listen to employees about what they needed and then created a test user to see the experience unfold from the employee’s perspective. 

Accreditation Commission for Health Care

“We can tell them in the messaging of the service catalog that the turnaround time for this request is one to two days... this way, they don’t have to walk down and check the status. If it’s critical, they’ll know we’ve flagged it as critical, so there’s no need to take the extra step to call us.” - Bob Gardner, Manager, PMO & IT at ACHC

Once the service portal was set up for ACHC and employees began to submit requests through the portal rather than calling or visiting the support team, they were able to build and maintain accurate SLAs. A visibility that became important, relieving frustration both for employees and support team members. Gardner points out that many employee services require interaction with multiple departments, emphasizing the importance of multiple departments working and collaborating within the same platform.  Their single employee service platform allows ACHC to provide efficient interdepartmental services to all employees, in one place.

GOYA Foods

“We can put power back into our people’s hands to allow them to close their own ticket. We use the service portal to give them information like, ‘Hey, these are the top 10 issues people have been putting in’ or ‘Here’s a little bulletin about a scheduled change that’s happening this Friday.'" - Bryan Greer, Senior System Engineer at Goya Foods

Choosing Samanage was easy for Greer, but his main focus was on his employees. He knew he needed to put some processes in place to ensure Goya was providing the best possible service for employees. To do that he started by creating access to the service desk and to self-service options through an employee service portal. In addition, he not only created a set of SLAs to hold his team accountable for providing swift, useful responses, but Greer and his team use customer satisfaction surveys to keep a constant pulse on how employees feel about the service they’re receiving.

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Each of these customers spans different industries but they all have the same goal. They’re all looking to fulfill the needs of employees in a way that promotes productivity and increases efficiency. By empowering other stakeholders, teaching them the processes, and working alongside them to help them understand and build the workflows they’ll be using every day, these IT leaders were able to set each department up for success.