Sitehelpdesk.com has won new contracts with Merlin Housing Society and Bron Afon Community Housing to provide web-based support to their internal IT departments.
Merlin Housing and Bron Afon both went live with Sitehelpdesk.com in July 2009, with each suite of software costing less than £5000, apparently a tenth of the costs of the other proposals the two organisations received.
Sitehelpdesk.com will provide both housing associations with a web-based system to log calls from end-users to their internal IT departments and help them respond to IT issues more efficiently. The software logs all calls and monitors how quickly each query is dealt with to provide detailed reports for senior managers about how the IT department is performing.
Sitehelpdesk.com’s add-on applications, including SLAmonitor, EMLmonitor and WMImonitor, are also being used by both organisations. SLAmonitor helps to measure SLAs and manages end-user expectations by alerting the IT department when a service level threshold has been exceeded. EMLmonitor connects to the IT department’s mail server and audits emails that are meant for them so that a ticket can be logged and a response sent to the user immediately. WMImonitor is an auditing tool which enables IT departments to view what software they have and how many computers it is installed on.
Bron Afon Community Housing has nine IT staff supporting 350 end-users. Bron Afon originally outsourced its IT service desk support, but wanted to improve its service and take more control so eventually brought its front-line service department in-house.
Leighton Keenan, ICT manager, Bron Afon Community Housing, said, “We liked the simplicity of Sitehelpdesk.com. Having implemented it and trained our staff, the system went live in July 2009. The web-based interface allowed us to roll the system out to all users easily, helping us to focus on supporting the organisation.”
South Gloucestershire-based Merlin Housing Society has nine IT staff supporting 300 end-users. Last year it installed a new IT infrastructure using the latest industry standards and began looking into internal support software.
Chris Stanton, ICT infrastructure manager, Merlin Housing Society, said, “Being a relatively new organisation, we are investing in new IT equipment so we wanted to ensure that our IT department could manage issues and problems quickly and effectively, monitor our SLAs, track the company’s assets and report to senior management. Having completed a tendering exercise, we found that Sitehelpdesk.com was the most cost-effective system to meet our requirements.”
