Revitalizing the Help Desk The fast-growing wine superstore was relying on a help desk solution that had gone flat. Using the aging Altiris help desk software was cumbersome. Staff could input tickets, but those requests were often missing vital information or languished in the wrong queue. Getting meaningful reporting meant Total Wine managers had to export data and manipulate it in Excel. Morale of service desk analysts was low.
As the new IT service desk manager for Total Wine, Candice Jackson’s top priority was to improve the service desk platform that supported IT, accounting, and human resource processes for 2,000 employees. Total Wine set its sights on an IT service management (ITSM) solution that would improve support efficiency and effectiveness, and provide useful metrics. Having a self-service functionality was part of the blend of requirements, so stores could be notified immediately of any IT outages, including the business-critical point-of-sale system.
Jackson worked closely with managers in Total Wine’s stores and line-of-business managers to identify the pain points, and then led vetting of solutions from Ivanti, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and EasyVista. Jackson liked Ivanti’s Hybrid IT strategy, which freed Total Wine to deploy in the cloud or on-premises. Ultimately, Total Wine selected Ivanti Service Manager for easy scalability to support the company’s rapid growth and the ability to integrate smoothly with its other business applications.
Total Wine chose to implement Ivanti Service Manager in the cloud for the easy deployment and hassle-free maintenance. “Based on our experience with upgrading our previous help desk solution, our IT team chose a hosted solution. We can depend on Ivanti to upgrade the system. We don’t need to buy another server or maintain the software,” says Jackson.
Total Wine uses Ivanti Service Manager with Incident, Problem, Change, Knowledge, and Service Request modules. Employees at headquarters or in any store can easily request a service or change, plan for appropriate remediation measures, approve and authorize the request automatically, implement the change, and audit the successful completion of the change.
Ready to Consume
“We really liked that we could use Ivanti Service Manager out of the box,” says Jackson. “We are implementing ITIL processes, and Ivanti provided a good framework to start. We didn’t need to tweak the workflow if we didn’t want to. The incident and service-request templates were ready to use immediately.”
The return was immediate. “We replaced our previous help desk system in less than 60 days,” says Jackson.
Total Wine’s retail, IT, and accounting teams use Ivanti Service Manager daily, and user reaction has been universally positive. With Ivanti’s Self-Service portal, employees can submit new requests, report incidents, and track the progress of their tickets with ease. In the first quarter of using Self-Service, the service desk staff fielded 300 fewer calls.
“Our users love the new Ivanti system,” says Jackson. “Managers love having the information they need in easy-touse dashboards and reports. Our retail employees can easily see if there is an outage with a key system, such as point-of-sale, and what they should use as a workaround.”
Morale on the service desk has improved, as staff was trained on service desk and ITIL best practices and earned certifications on key business technologies.
The addition of Ivanti Service Manager’s workflow has helped Total Wine refine its business processes for IT, human resources, and accounting. Service desk staff members are now viewed not only as experts in resolving IT issues, but also as experts in the technology needs of the business.
With the previous help desk product, creating tickets was so time-consuming and error-prone that there was a backlog of 500 open tickets. Ivanti Service Manager has eliminated that inefficiency.
The solution’s drag-and-drop workflow designer makes it easy to create and modify service workflows. Under the old system, all accounting tickets had to be routed and handled the same way, resulting in service delays. “We worked with the accounting department to create templates that would be routed to three different groups,” says Jackson. “With the Ivanti templates, we cut down on mis-assigned tickets by 90 percent.”
Automating workflow with Ivanti Service Manager in the cloud has made it easier to set up new employees, which is essential for a fast-growing retail business. In the past, managers used a paper form to request a laptop or desktop for a new hire, but the form didn’t ask whether the employee needed two monitors. “The manager would inevitably call to tell us that the new hire didn’t get what they needed,” says Jackson. “With Ivanti Service Manager, all of the questions for a new hire are part of the template.”
A Solution that Gets Better with Age
Ivanti Service Manager has become an indispensable tool for IT and the business alike. Total Wine’s IT infrastructure and business-application development teams are using the solution to make change-and-release processes more reliable. As next steps, Jackson looks forward to turning on Ivanti Voice to improve call handling and deliver an even better customer experience.