This customer story is based off of a presentation by Erin Collins, Senior Business Support Analyst at Generali, during the Valiantys Enterprise Day London 2018. Find the full video here.
If we can give you one piece of advice to guide your entire ITSM strategy, it is this: Be willing to adapt, as your business needs won’t stay the same. This is why Valiantys stands behind Jira Service Desk as the ITSM tool flexible enough to provide a wide range of solutions for the challenges around asset management, incident and problem management, change management, automations, and any other business process which you may face.
One of our super-star customers, Generali, chose to scale with their business requirements rather than resisting needed adjustments. Here is their story of how one deployment of Jira Service Desk transformed into multiple solutions.
How Generali’s ITSM journey began
If you have ever needed insurance, you’ve probably heard of Generali; they are one of the top three global insurers with millions of policyholders worldwide, including some of the world’s best known multinational companies and brands. They provide a broad and comprehensive range of insurance products, from property and casualty insurance, specialty lines protection, employee benefits and global assistance services. It’s a growing industry, and with that comes a higher demand for quality IT services.
Generali first deployed Jira in 2008 – the same year Atlassian first released the tool – for project and risk management. Confident in Atlassian’s track record, in 2014 Generali deployed Jira Service Desk, Confluence and a variety of Marketplace apps to build their ITSM solution.
Over a ten-year period the growth of their Atlassian tools increased significantly, scaling with the rate of their customer base. In 2008, they had 10 Jira users and 40 internal service desk customers, stats that significantly grew in 2017 when they had 120 Jira users and over 700 service desk users. Given this strong adoption, the Generali team decided to upgrade its service desk to ensure quality services remained intact as user growth increased.
Their roadmap included making more use of the features available from the tool, maintaining their apps and leveraging the integration within the system, and improving governance – all while ensuring the continuity of service. In order to implement their new service desk, the team needed to increase their training surrounding Jira Service Desk and Marketplace apps. They deployed EazyBi for more advanced reports and Exocet to generate subtasks from post-functions.
Improving communications between IT managers and customers
Promoting the portal internally was also a major goal for Generali. “Most of our customers didn’t know there was a portal available, in fact more than 70% of requests, incidents, and changes were being reported by email,” says Erin Collins at Generali. They therefore started an intensive “coming soon” communications campaign for their end users in order to give more visibility to Jira Service Desk.
A comprehensive service catalog was added to the Confluence knowledge base, an initiative which was spearheaded by Valiantys. This marked a turning point in the company’s ITIL approach, as users had the means to access information regarding what the IT team can offer as services, how it could be done, how often, and who to contact. Faced with the large number of features available in Confluence natively, along with apps like RefinedTheme for Confluence and TeamCalendar, Generali appreciated Valiantys’ support for exploring their needs and integrating the Confluence service catalog with Jira Service Desk. Service desk agents can create user guides directly from Jira Service Desk. All users have a shortcut to this Confluence space and from the service catalog, they can navigate the HelpDesk’s available resources.
Generali service desk customers appreciate the branded portal, which is user-friendly and helpful. It is built like a modern website, with a homepage offering quick links on simple actions, the most popular pages, and links to key sections, including a page describing the end user’s technology profile.
Furthermore, Generali’s yearly IT survey showed resolution and engagement were the top pain points, so this was addressed by deploying Candylio, a customer satisfaction survey app. Engagement between the IT team and users significantly changed for the better. “If someone takes the time to provide comments, we reach out to thank or get more detail to improve,” says Erin. The users’ feedback contributed to the continuous improvement for defining and managing the most strategic ticket types, along with generating Jira Service Desk’s user adoption.
Outsourcing ITSM support in a smart way
Their single Jira instance contains 3 service desk portals and 72 projects. This represents over 1,500 service desk tickets per month, which is more than twice the number of tickets from the other 72 projects combined. Maintenance is performed monthly by the three Jira admins, including Erin, and several Jira project administrators.
Three years after the original deployment, Generali decided it best to outsource management for the frontline and deskside support services in order for the core team to focus on higher-level tasks; they were pleased to find that Jira Service Desk was able to evolve in face of these new changes. As all Atlassian tools integrate to be essentially one platform, The outsourced team for managing their level 1 support can easily work with Generali, as they have all the necessary information available through Jira Service Desk.
However, by subcontracting their service desk’s first level, Generali was now billed as soon as their provider starts to process the ticket. To save resources, Generali needed better automations in Jira Service Desk, and learned how to automated several actions to avoid simple tickets from reaching their subcontractors.
As a result, Generali can optimize outsourced activities through automation and closely monitor the services’ activity and quality.
Managing assets and the on-boarding process
Before Valiantys implemented Insight in Jira Service Desk as their CMDB solution, Generali had the usual challenges faced by every organization without a defined configuration management database. They needed one version of the truth to relate applications, infrastructure, and service providers. The service desk needed to know who supported what, who owns what, how do we escalate, to who, etc.
With the use of the Insight app by Riada, they were able to build a systematic way to relate users to services, equipment and accesses that they require. This has helped to automate their new starter process.
Results that make a difference
Their Jira Service Desk platform adapts to the growing number of users, and the IT team can get all of their requirements met through Marketplace apps. Over the years, Generali has turned to Valiantys to be their reliable partner for evolving their service desk. “We asked for assistance with every one of our apps and every stage of our growth, and they’ve been more than willing to step up to the plate for some of our more challenging requests,” says Erin.
The full customer story is available on our website, which can be found here.
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