Service desk success stories: Unisys' formula for award-winning support
July 2, 2024 / Weston Morris | Patrycja Sobera
Short on time? Read the key takeaways:
- Prioritize the end-user experience over traditional metrics by understanding the client's business goals and key user personas. Craft experience-level agreements that ensure support makes a tangible difference for employees.
- Invest in employee training and career development and celebrate individual and team successes to foster a positive, client-focused culture that serves as the foundation for delivering exceptional service desk support.
- Adopt a proactive approach to analyzing data such as device health information to help organizations optimize their technology experience and save costs. This sets the service desk apart through continuous improvement and innovation.
Your employees' experience with technology support can make or break their productivity and satisfaction. When technology issues arise, your service desk is often the first point of contact for frustrated employees.
As Weston Morris, host of The Digital Workplace Deep Dive podcast, puts it, "Nobody calls the service desk and goes, 'Hey, I love you, great job. You know, you just made my day.' No, we call when something's broken."
How your service desk provider handles these interactions can significantly impact your organization's overall success. In a recent podcast episode, Patrycja Sobera, vice president of global delivery for Digital Workplace Solutions at Unisys, revealed the secrets behind her team's astounding success. Over the past two years, they have earned an impressive 11 industry awards from respected organizations like the Help Desk Institute and the Service Desk Institute.
"It has certainly been an amazing journey for us," Sobera reflected. "My passion is rooted firmly in the digital workplace and evolving our support and delivery capability. How do we help people work and collaborate so it enables true digital workplace improvement?”
What’s the secret to Unisys’ award-winning service? According to Sobera, there are two key ingredients: experience and culture.
The power of proactive experience management
At Unisys, service level agreements (SLAs) and KPIs are secondary to end-user experience. "We completely put that aside," Sobera explains. “First and foremost, we focus on what our clients actually do. What are their business goals? Who are the key personas essential to those goals?"
This deep understanding of clients allows Unisys to craft experience level agreements (XLAs) that go beyond standard SLAs to ensure that the support they provide makes a tangible difference for employees. Unisys then makes use of a dedicated experience management office to translate insights derived from the XLAs into specific improvements in employee experience. The results speak for themselves.
- For one manufacturer, analyzing device health data revealed that 5,000 out of 9,000 PCs slated for replacement were performing well. Keeping those devices saved the company $5 million (see details below).
- A healthcare company struggled with visibility during a significant merger involving 195,000 employees. By deploying device experience tools, establishing XLAs and homing in on frontline worker needs, Unisys gave back 600,000 productive hours to essential doctors and nurses (see details below).
Putting culture and people first
Experience measurement would fall flat without a motivated team to drive improvement. "I feel so privileged to live in this era of unprecedented technological change," Sobera shares. "But technology alone is not enough to make a difference."
That's why Unisys invests heavily in ongoing training and career development for their support professionals, celebrating individual and team successes to foster a positive, client-focused culture. This shines through in stories like that of:
- Danny Niu, a service desk agent who won two global awards for outstanding performance before being promoted to a supervisor role
- Yudit Gal, a supervisor who led her team through a significant ITSM platform migration for an airline client while exceeding performance standards
"When your employees reach out to a Unisys service desk, they're not just connecting with a faceless support agent," Morris observed. "They're tapping into a team of professionals passionate about delivering exceptional experiences."
Why partner with an award-winning service desk provider
Partnering with an award-winning service desk provider like Unisys can transform your employees' technology support experience, boost productivity, and drive satisfaction across your organization. As Sobera put it, the mantra she and her team follow is, "Let's just get it right. Let's get it right the first time, every time."
By leveraging Unisys' expertise and resources, you gain access to best-in-class support practices and technologies, the ability to scale and adapt to your unique needs and the peace of mind that comes with knowing your employees are in capable hands.
If you're ready to improve your organization's service desk, consider partnering with Unisys. Contact Unisys today to learn how to transform your digital workplace and unlock your employees' full potential. To listen to the full podcast, tune in here.
Reimagine field services for today's hybrid workplace.
Manufacturer saves $5M on device refresh
When a manufacturer approached Unisys for help with their device refresh strategy, they had no idea that a simple change could save them millions. The company had been following a strict policy of replacing all devices at the end of a three-year warranty cycle, but Unisys saw an opportunity to optimize its approach.
By proactively analyzing the health data of the manufacturer's 9,000-device fleet, Unisys made a surprising discovery: 5,000 devices were still performing optimally without any issues, while only 3,000 were performing below the expected performance threshold.
With this information, Unisys recommended that the company keep its 5,000 well-performing devices in operation. This simple change in strategy ultimately saved the manufacturer $5 million in device refresh costs and supported their sustainability efforts by reducing electronic waste.
Thanks to Unisys' proactive analysis of device health data, the manufacturer made a wise, data-driven decision that significantly impacted their bottom line and environmental footprint.
Merged healthcare company recovers 600,000 frontline worker hours
When two healthcare organizations merged, bringing together 195,000 employees, they faced a daunting challenge: ensuring a seamless transition and maintaining high-quality patient care. The newly formed company struggled with limited visibility into end-user experience, software changes and technology performance across the merging entities.
Unisys implemented a digital experience management tool to address these issues and serve as a single source of truth for device performance data. They also collaborated with the company to establish experience level agreements focused on measuring and improving experience parity throughout the merger.
Unisys conducted persona journey mapping workshops to understand the needs and challenges of frontline workers such as nurses, doctors and emergency room admitting staff. By identifying and resolving key pain points for these essential healthcare workers, Unisys recovered nearly 600,000 hours of productive time that would have otherwise been lost to IT issues, enabling the client's employees to focus on their core mission of saving lives.
