SLA performance hits 96% with Sostenuto

Chessington, 15 September 2009. Vision Express has announced record service management performance as the result of a two year IT service transformation project, with SLA performance up from 87% to 96% in the past year.

The high street optical retailer, whose project has just been shortlisted for the Retail Systems Awards 2009, to be announced later this year, is well known for its pioneering one-hour turnaround pledge to its customers. It took the decision to overhaul some of its internal processes in order to help it maintain its high standards of service. Central to the project was the implementation of service management software Sostenuto by Sunrise across the IT function as well as other areas of the business. The concept of an integrated service has been extended to the retailer’s product department, where Sostenuto underpins the activity of the logistics helpdesk.

Desktop Services Manager Louise Smith comments: “Sostenuto is so easy to configure that it just made sense to use it in other areas of the business. After all, a store calling to track products on order is not much different from someone contacting the IT service desk about a problem with a printer. We’ve just adapted the processes, workflows and screens to match the different requirements.”

In line with the improvement in SLA metrics, user satisfaction has risen significantly, with the latest annual survey showing that 92% of staff rate the service as a 4/5 or a 5/5.

Louise puts these results partly down to better communication, thanks to automated updates generated through the system, but also increased efficiency on the teams using Sostenuto: “The software is easy to use and allows us to work more intelligently,” says Louise. “Each store has up to five dispensing machines and one lab machine, which, across 319 branches, can be a challenge to keep track of. Sostenuto’s associations function allows us to link stores to specific configuration items, and deal with calls a lot faster.”

The software has also provided managers with a tool to track workloads and resourcing more closely, resulting in better motivation levels across the teams.
 
Louise says that working with Sunrise has been smooth right from the start: “The Sostenuto implementation went without hiccups. We closed the old system on the Friday, switched on Sostenuto on the Monday and have never looked back since.”

On the strength of its successes over the past two years, since beginning its IT service transformation project, Vision Express is now looking to improve processes in further business areas using Sostenuto’s capabilities. For further information on Vision Express’s service improvement project, and to download the full case study, please click here.