Host Ventura Group is an IT infrastructure solutions provider that offers customizable platforms for third-party hosting and service management solutions. The company operates primarily in Europe with offices in Bulgaria, Germany, United Kingdom, Argentina, and Poland. The company has partnered with leading software companies like VMware and Nubera to offer cost-effective and reliable services.
Krasimira Stefanova, customer service director at Host Ventura, heads the company's 10-member IT team. The company had been using the standard edition of ServiceDesk Plus MSP since 2012, and the tool satisfied all their basic ticketing requirements. As the company grew in size, the team wanted to develop its help desk operations by adopting more ITSM processes such as problem management, change management, asset management, and configuration management.
Krasimira wanted to differentiate between incidents and service requests specific to different accounts and products. She also wanted discrete help desk modules that would list, track, and help manage service requests, incidents, problems, and changes as separate categories. Without a knowledge base in place, technicians had to share known solutions through meetings, emails, and telephone calls that consumed a lot of time and reduced ticket resolution rates. "We had a lot of known issues with our products, and we didn't have a knowledge base where we can publish our solutions," says Krasimira.
Although there was plenty of asset-related documentation, it was difficult to manage the assets centrally without an asset management module. The technicians had to call end users for workstation details and other connected assets. This resulted in longer ticket resolution times. Krasimira says, "We had a lot of documentation for all of our assets, and it was difficult for us to relate every asset to a separate employee." The team wanted to have a well-defined CMDB that would clearly depict relationships between various configuration items.
Krasimira was satisfied with ServiceDesk Plus MSP and did not want to switch to any other product. She upgraded to the enterprise edition of ServiceDesk Plus MSP, which helps the team manage and support different customer accounts and products by using a single application. Separate email addresses are configured for different accounts and customizable, account-specific login pages are created to enhance security and visibility. Each account has its unique configuration with respect to business rules, service level agreements, and knowledge base, so the company can offer personalized IT service.
The IT team is now able to segregate incidents from service requests so that technicians clearly know what they need to work on. ServiceDesk Plus MSP offers individual modules for handling incidents, problems, and changes - all built on the ITSM framework. This helps the team manage and track incidents, problems, and changes separately. Also the ability to link incidents, problems, and changes gives the team better control and a seamless view of their IT service desk operations.
Krasimira says, "Because of the new IT challenges that we were experiencing, we needed a help desk solution that could scale up to meet those needs and handle different customers as different accounts. The enterprise version of ServiceDesk Plus MSP offered different modules for requests, problems, and changes, and it is now more easy for us to segregate and manage them."
ServiceDesk Plus MSP offers an account-specific knowledge base with access control capabilities that allows solutions to be seen only by the relevant technicians. All known issues are now documented and published in the knowledge base under specific topics for easy access. The keyword search option and search filters further simplify the process of finding the right solution. Articles are submitted for approval before being published in the portal to help refine the quality of information being published.
Krasimira says, "With ServiceDesk Plus, we were able to easily build our knowledge base from scratch. Our technicians can now refer to knowledge base articles and copy them as ticket resolutions at the click of a button. This has helped us improve the overall ticket resolution time significantly."
With the integrated asset management module, the team now has complete knowledge of all hardware and software assets. All workstations, network devices, and other assets specific to different accounts were imported into the ServiceDesk Plus MSP database by using the Windows domain scan, network scan, and distributed asset scan. The ability to map workstations to end users helps the team gain details of the workstation from which a ticket is raised and this speeds up the resolution time. The team can now easily identify problematic assets because ServiceDesk Plus MSP gives a clear picture of all incidents, problems, and changes related to any particular asset.
The team maps relationships between assets, users, business services, and other configuration items. This gives the team a graphical, easy-to-refer-to representation of their IT infrastructure. The CMDB helps the IT team solve problems with effective root cause analysis and facilitates proactive risk assessment and impact analysis when handling changes.
Krasimira says, "With the asset management feature, we are able to organize all our company assets in one place; and with CMDB, we are able to follow all CI relationships."
Krasimira and the team have been able to significantly streamline and scale their IT operations with ServiceDesk Plus MSP. When asked what is best about the application, Krasimira says, "We like almost everything about the product but what we like the most is that ServiceDesk Plus is ITSM-based and very user-friendly." And that, we think, makes all the difference!