Selwood Housing’s IT team, based in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, supports 120 employees, typically dealing with 100 calls each week. The housing association was previously using Microsoft Access to log enquiries, but 25 per cent of calls were lost or had to be followed up by the end-users, resulting in frustrated staff and disorganised workloads for the IT team.
Richard Nasey, IT team manager, Selwood Housing, said, “Access was little more than a ‘to do’ list. It didn’t integrate with other programmes or let us report on the work we were doing, so we realised that we needed a system specifically designed to meet service-desk requirements.”
Selwood Housing considered a number of off-the-shelf service-desk systems, but most were “clunky, overly complex and prohibitively expensive”, while Vivantio’s system was a quarter of the price and had everything that Selwood Housing needed, mainly the facility to organise, track and report service-desk calls.
Using Vivantio, records are now created instantly for each enquiry which can be tracked, shared and even exported to other applications such as Excel and Outlook. Nasey can now easily see the status of any call, and quickly identify those which are outstanding or overdue. Call trend reports can be created at the touch of a button and the resulting analysis used to manage resources and improve administration.
Vivantio provided initial training and within an hour, the IT team were up and running, with the Vivantio system providing the first benchmark against which the IT team could measure their performance and enabling them to produce monthly management reports.
