How Guildford Borough Council reduced costs and increased efficiency by creating a single, centralised solution with Halo Service Desk.
Reduction in tickets logged due to self-serve functionality
Improved decision making by viewing real-time information in one place
Fast and accurate responses to internal and external enquiries
Customer
Guildford Borough Council
Industry
Public Sector
Tickets
2,500 per month
Customer Since
2016
At a glance
Requirements
- Service Desk to help deliver their Digital Transformation Project
- Streamlined processes with a single service desk offering.
- Consolidate and centralise their systems to better manage and allocate resources and personnel.
- Expand Halo Service Desk to its legal, facilities HR, finance and procurement departments
- A knowledge base so employees can self-serve
- Dashboards and reporting to manage and prioritise work
Solution
Halo Service Desk’s single service desk offering gave Guildford Borough Council the tools they needed to create a centralised, streamlined approach in order to increase efficiency and reduce costs.
About Guildford Borough Council
When a restructure for Guildford Borough Council was looming, they knew they could trust Halo Service Desk to help deliver their Digital Transformation Project.
Guildford Borough Council had been using Halo Service Desk for a number of years within their ICT department and saw vast improvements throughout this time. Prior to Halo Service Desk, Guildford Borough Council were relying on emails and legacy ways of working, they found implementing Halo Service Desk was a welcomed change.
The Challenge
Guildford Borough Council was on a mission to reduce costs and increase productivity. Before the restructure, each department had their own processes, giving them only a localised understanding of their issues and systems.
However, this modular way of working had more drawbacks than benefits. This setup proved costly and inefficient as each department was only working to serve themselves. Duplicated efforts, a lack of knowledge base articles which couldn’t be shared across departments and different processes in place meant collaboration was hard. Further issues arose with out of hours support and peak time activity. These drawbacks led to slow processes, less traceability and more requests.
Additionally, management had no information on volume of work, turnaround times or completed work due to a lack of dashboards and reporting. Therefore, this meant they were not able to effectively manage or prioritise workloads.
The Solution
Once the restructure was confirmed and objectives set, Guildford Borough Council began to strategise their mission of increasing efficiency and saving costs. They took a helicopter view of their current processes and saw they were struggling with disparate processes. From this, they understood the need for a streamlined approach with a single service desk offering.
They knew utilising the same processes and workflows by consolidating and centralising their current service desk could help them better manage and allocate resources and personnel. With the success of the ICT team, they saw Halo Service Desk as a vital tool to transform their organisation. With this knowledge, Guildford Borough Council decided to expand Halo Service Desk to its legal, facilities HR, finance and procurement departments to create one centralised system.
Halo Service Desk knew how developing a standardised, centralised service desk could help Guildford Borough Council with their Digital Transformation Project. Halo Service Desk understood their requirements and our expert consultants helped curate a tailored solution to suit the councils needs. They now have one service desk which is manned by a dedicated case worker team to answer general queries, alongside smaller speciality teams for more specific requests.
Storing and sharing knowledge allows for scaling, optimising and maturing your organisation. With their current system in place, unintentional knowledge hoarding was rife as there was no way to share information. Halo Service Desk’s knowledge base solves this issue and is now a fundamental feature for knowledge sharing.
The Results
By implementing a standardised, streamlined service desk throughout multiple departments, Guildford Borough Council have managed to successfully accomplish this part of their Digital Transformation Project. As a knock on effect, a significant amount of time is being saved, alongside customer satisfaction and SLA compliance increasing rapidly.
As the proverb goes, ‘knowledge is power’ and with the self-service functionality, employees can now find answers to queries without having to raise a ticket. Thus reducing tickets logged and freeing up time for more important tasks.
With multiple departments having the same processes, the council can now manage and allocate resources and personnel better than ever before. For example, they now have:
- Greater ability to identify any risks and troubleshoot them before they develop
- Better decision making by viewing key information in one place in real time
- A clearer view of the organisation to monitor all projects with a single solution.
