Vale of Aylesbury Housing Trust has reduced its outstanding IT helpdesk queries by almost 90 per cent following the introduction of Sitehelpdesk.com.
Until just over a year ago, VAHT was using an Access database developed in-house to log and track support calls to its IT department. But as VAHT grew, the database’s lack of sophistication and robustness became a limiting factor for the IT department.
Rick Smith, IT manager, Vale of Aylesbury Housing Trust, said, “We discovered that many calls were not being logged correctly or automatically, and it was a nightmare when staff were on holiday as it was almost impossible to work out who was doing what and how far each query had been progressed.” VAHT also found it hard to produce suitable reports for the management team.
Following initial market research, VAHT invited a number of large and small providers of support software to tender, eventually selecting Sitehelpdesk.com as it met of VAHT’s business requirements at a fraction of the price of the competing systems. The value of the initial Sitehelpdesk.com software was £3000 plus a further £1500 for installation and training, including a 15 per cent discount due to VAHT’s charitable status.
Having ordered the Sitehelpdsk.com system in June 2008, the system was installed and fully operational during July 2008. Sitehelpdesk-IT is a web-based system for logging calls from VAHT’s 170 full-time end-users to its internal IT department and to help it respond to IT issues more efficiently. It also allows the IT department to log all IT equipment and track assets. Furthermore, the software tracks how quickly each query is completed to provide detailed reports for senior managers.
Smith explained, “It was vital for us to not only be able to pull everything together in one place, but also to see where all of our assets were located. We needed a system that was simple to set up, would be ready to implement straight away and also one that met our budget requirements.”
VAHT also installed Sitehelpdesk.com’s WMIMonitor for software auditing, EMLMonitor for emailing and logging job tickets, and SLAMonitor for tracking service-level agreements and thresholds.
Smith said, “Before implementing Sitehelpdesk.com, we had at least 300 IT queries outstanding – that has now decreased dramatically to fewer than 40. We can now justify the IT department’s productivity as well as fine-tuning the availability of helpdesk staff to typical end-user call patterns.
“Having a solid reporting function was also a key priority. We needed to report to the management team to ensure that targets were being met, problems were being solved and that nothing was taking too long to complete.”
VAHT is now implementing Sitehelpdesk.com in its facilities department to help staff managing calls relating to the office environment. Smith said, “We have been so impressed with the way that Sitehelpdesk.com has allowed our IT department to run more efficiently that we decided to roll out Sitehelpdesk.com onto other departments.”
