Service transformation

Supporting organisation restructure with high performance service desk for leading insurance and risk law firm.

Growth, ambition & restructure

Following a number of major mergers and accelerated growth, this insurance and dispute resolution law firm set out its 5-year vision to become one of the leading global insurance and risk law specialists.

This initiated a restructure of the firm to reflect its customers’ needs and its goal of helping them to reduce the time and money spent on managing risk and resolving disputes.

Its focus was on an efficient client service delivery model naturally led to a spotlight on the contribution from IT in achieving this. The firm subsequently in a new IT Director to take on this challenge.

The importance of IT support

When it came to the importance of IT support helping to achieve the law firm’s vision, there was a consensus that lawyers and staff must have the necessary tools and support to perform their roles as effectively as possible.

Both IT Director and Head of IT agreed that the Service Desk directly impacts on end-user productivity levels.

The IT Service Desk team at the firm had evolved organically with the business and its capacity and structure were becoming stretched. It was affecting the overall perception of IT. “The Service Desk is the shop window for IT. For many users, it is IT.” explains the Head of IT.

Acora specialises in helping organisations transform their IT support functions by combining best practice theory with a strong track record both in the legal and other professional service sectors. The law firm’s IT management team made the decision to engage Acora to carry out a formal, independent review of the Service Desk and its impact the business and the IT function.

The review covered the people, processes and technology elements. Methods included key player interviews, process reviews, statistical analysis and ITIL maturity ranking to build an understanding of the current environment. Acora also provided recommendations on how to transform the Service Desk into an enterprise-grade, high-performance function.

Following a structured procurement process, the law firm chose Acora to deliver this transformation and ultimately manage the Service Desk.

With Acora, we have been able to achieve an enterprise grade IT Service Desk platform ready to support the business with our growth plans

IT Director, Top 50 UK Law FIRM

Enter Acora, enter process

One of the main findings of the service review was a difficulty in accessing meaningful management reporting. The law firm was being held back by its incumbent toolset technology and a lack of formal process.

As part of the service transformation, Acora implemented and configured ServiceNow, a leading Service Desk toolset. The firm’s Head of IT comments; “This was a really important step for us. It allowed us to access much more accurate figures and statistics around performance, establish proper SLAs and start to measure against them.”

With this visibility, both Acora and the internal IT team could start to analyse trends and build insights allowing the firm to prioritise issues and investment. Repeated and unnecessary calls were significantly reduced, and a culture of continuous service improvement could begin with a definable starting benchmark.

The transition period moved the Service Desk from handling and distributing contacts to a customer centric, highly responsive and resolution based entity.

The transformation also focused on defining and documenting process, including the role and accountability of the Service Desk Analyst, drawing from ITIL best practice and experience and then applying those to the firm’s specific environment.

Now the Service Desk team is seen as an integral part of the IT department. First time fix rates have increased from 57% at the start of the project to recent statistics of 84%. Service desk resolution is now at levels around 90%, which is unprecedented.

Head of IT, Top 30 UK LAW FIRM

Benefits

The firm’s Head of IT explains there has been several significant benefits from the transformation project and Acora’s ongoing management of the Service Desk. “Previously it was not possible to identify and prioritise there issues. We had no structured way to reduce the number of calls. Now the Service Desk team is seen as an integral part of the IT department. First time fix rates have increased to 84%. Service desk resolution is now at 90%, which is unprecedented. With only 10% of all contacts being escalated to other IT teams. Better communication has meant that working relationships between the Service Desk and the rest of IT have dramatically improved. With end user satisfaction hugely improved and less distraction for others in IT, we now have much more time to focus on other IT projects that will improve the business.”

With accurate and accessible reporting, combined with clear processes and continuous service improvement, the IT team and Acora have been able to significantly drive down call volumes by tackling issues uncovered by regular incident analysis.