At BMC Exchange 2021, we heard from BMC customers who are on their way to becoming an Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE). Three shared their story of how they’re using technology to deliver a Transcendent Customer Experience, one of the ADE tenets.
Monash University
In the “Delivering Better Services through Digital Workplace Engagements” session, Monash University, a BMC customer for over a decade, discussed how it’s delivering service excellence and interactions through a modern digital workplace. Monash University is a modern, global, research-intensive university serving Australia and the Indo-Pacific.
The university spans 18,000 staff, around 80,000 students, hundreds of sites, and ten faculties that IT Director Matt Carmichael says could each be treated as a separate business. “The Dean of the faculty, you could regard like a CIO [because] they have their own budget, they have their own staff. So…we have to keep our CEOs happy,” he says.
“Our job is to service them in whatever shape that service might take. And ten different business units can require ten different service levels, so, for us, keeping the 700 plus applications running or being able to service requests and incidents around those applications is a big task. BMC…is our conduit into our teams in order to fulfill day-to-day requests and incidents when they unfortunately happen.”
“Monash needed flexibility. We have a really large workforce, and that workforce requires us to keep pace with them [and in] many cases staying in front of them. It’s our job to have services that can keep it fresh and modern and enjoyable to use. That’s why we’ve stayed on the BMC platform and grown and had it grow with us.”
Security has also been important. “The universities are a rich target area for cybercriminals. [By moving] to [BMC Helix] Digital Workplace as a service, [we] maintain regular updates so that we can stay safe and keep our students and staff safe,” he shares.
Next up, Monash will be adding chatbot features to its Digital Workplace deployment. “We are leading the curve. “We have self-help, we have knowledge articles. We have assets, we have incident problem, change management turned on. We have work order templates turned on,” he explains.
“We want to turn chatbot on very shortly and we can do that in just a short matter of weeks . [Our students tell] us they’re not using the phone a lot. They’re using SMS. They’re using apps. They’re on a digital footprint. So we needed to be able to pivot really quickly and implement that for them now.”
“We can turn that on for them really quickly. We need to be available all the time. BMC Digital Workplace…is really about enabling a global 24×7 workforce. The key for us is our ability to activate a service or option and bring it to our students and our researchers and our academics for them to utilize without them knowing they needed it until they’ve gotten it.”
To view the full panel, click here (it’s free to register)!
Maple Leaf Foods
Another BMC customer, Maple Leaf Foods, discussed how it’s providing its employees with great self-service in the session, “Unleash Employee Success Through Self-Service.” During the session, Ali Beeai, Director of IS Technical Services and Support, talked about how doing more with less is ingrained in the company’s DNA.
“Maple Leaf Foods is over a hundred years old. We have almost 14,000 employees. We are committed to becoming the most sustainable protein company on earth. We are looking to transform the world’s food system to survive and thrive for generations. [We] are the world’s first major carbon neutral food company. We focus a lot on waste elimination [and] eliminating wasted effort. BMC helped us automate so many manual processes [and] that actually allowed us to participate [in] the great cause of being carbon neutral,” Beeai shares.
“We do that by embracing the digital culture, promoting a mobile-first environment, [and] automating any processes that are manual processes. [We wanted to] modernize the user experience…so we looked at our service management and [realized] we needed to create that omnichannel where everybody can do their work and find everything in one centralized place.”
“We set some goals and we [saw that] we needed an ITSM solution that enables us to improve and innovate the manual. And knowledge management came to mind. We wanted to empower our end users to find the solution [on their own] before they pick up the phone or they log in online to log a ticket with our service desk.”
“Before we implemented the BMC Digital Workplace solution from BMC Helix, we were actually getting 80 percent of our incidents logged by phone, ten percent…on email, and then ten percent through other tools. We wanted it to be in one database…aligned in one centralized platform where everyone is collaborating. Within one year, we flipped the usage of phone calls from 80 percent to below 30 percent, and we want to go to 20 percent.”
The solution also helped with employee development. “It’s not easy for technical people to actually go and create user-friendly articles. But after you actually start the journey, you will find some people will thrive and shine, and will be your ambassadors, your pioneers within the team to actually take care of this, curate this, and take care of the quality at the beginning,” Beeai says.
“And now they’re more excited, they’re do something different [to] develop their career and focus on knowledge management, curating the skills. And we started to build this culture where more teams have those individuals who can create those knowledge articles.”
To view the full panel, click here (it’s free to register)!
Ericsson
BMC customer Ericsson discussed how the company has evolved and re-invented its enterprise service management practices during its session, “AISM: Deliver Agile Service Experiences to Speed Innovation.”
“We’re supporting over 120,000 employees…across 180 countries…[With] 5G, we have connected cars connected telephones, connected with fridges, everything is connected…and it’s actually supported by Ericsson’s technology. I support our colleagues to get a better experience when it comes to support within Ericsson. We’re [also] supporting our external business. This industry is evolving so fast and that means that we need to innovate to also keep up with the needs [of] the business,” says Martin Johansson, Strategic Product Manager at Ericsson.
“We are so much more than ITSM. We call ourselves enterprise service management [and] there’s a combination of solutions and platforms that are actually tightly tied together that goes across different organizations…it’s R and D, HR, supply, facilities, sourcing. We are working with all of them within this platform [and] are heavily integrated in the support processes.”
He says they’ve invested in the evolution of support through BMC Helix Digital Workplace so they don’t have multiple solutions that don’t talk to each other, and having a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution has streamlined that. “A lot of the hard work that it takes to operate a platform when you have it on prem, we don’t have to worry about any more. Now what we really want to focus on is the value to our customers. Our main prerogative and strategy is to give…value and bang for the buck to our customers.”
“We [have] more than 40 different internal customers and based on the [success of] the internal platform, there was room to actually do this for a different type of business unit that we call the as-a-service business. So we are scaling our competencies…for different use cases and different business needs…which gives more value to the company and that drives efficiency, as well.”
“We are working with some of the largest companies in the world…the telcos…the vehicle business. We have the competencies [and] the necessary tools to support [them] and we are now expanding to R and D heavily, especially when it comes to discovery and asset management and the processes that we have [implemented].”
“If you want to be able to scale efficiently, you need to have automation. We’ve implemented our agile methodology within our own team to try to keep up with all the demands coming in from the business. Over the last three years…we’ve been able to scale bolt-on capabilities and components with literally no impact to cost overall [maximizing] the competencies that we built up over many years.”
“AI, after security and operational stability, is the area that we are investing a lot of money across all units [for] anything [from] handling purchase orders to reducing password resets. AI, automation, machine learning, all of that…has been a big drive for many, many years now.”
With those tools, he said they’ve been able to reduce service calls. “We were trying to focus on the big volume tickets out there. We have over 17 million page views so far this year, and we’re processing over 1.7 million cases…We’ve processed over 1.2 median service requests and work orders. And half of them are actually automated today.”
“[For example], automating password resets can be done by our Digital Workplace portal or via the chatbot. Apparently a lot of us forget our passwords quite frequently now, and [Digital Workplace] is driving down the cost tremendously now. [We’ve had] 500 a month so far this year…and we need to log, audit, etc., so this reduces the time to actually spend on those types of activities [and] is helping us maximize the value of the product.”
To view the full panel, click here (it’s free to register)!
To see more of the great conversations from BMC Exchange 2021, visit https://exchange.bmc.com.
