Cepheid is a multinational biotech company specializing in molecular diagnostics. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale in California and has locations globally. The service desk is a follow the sun approach and consists of 2 teams, one US based covering north American and LATM and another based out of France covering EMEA and APAC and are internally facing. The EMEA/APAC service has on site staff in France, Kenya, South Africa, Singapore, India and China with 10 full members. The team has grown since the pandemic when the business added an additional 7000 staff. The team are SDI certified with SDM and SATL. They augment their onsite staff with a MSP providing level 1 and 2 service desk functions 24/7.
The EMEA/APAC service desk manager Leighton Davies comes originally from Wales in the UK and has a background in MSPs/Service Desk/ Wintel and Datacenter management. He is currently just over 4 years with Cepheid.
What made you join the SDI membership Community?
I have previously worked at a 5 star certified service desk based in South Wales and have seen first hand the difference it has made.
What member resources do you use?
The training courses and events have been fundamental.
What do you like the most about your membership?
The ability to connect to the industry and see the trends and best practices and apply them to my service desk.
What is the greatest challenge faced by your service?
Process maturity and scaling after a period of hyper growth due to the pandemic.
What difference has being a member made to your service and customers?
Membership has enabled us to keep up to date with new ideas and ways of working which we have managed to apply to our service such as chatbots and AI.
Why is it important to be part of a network/community?
It is important for us to be able to connect to other peers in the industry so we can explore ways of doing things. If we only speak internally we are shouting into an echo chamber and may not be able to come up with the best solution to provide value to our customers.
What achievement (of your team/service) are you most proud of and why?
Being able to support the hypergrowth to our business during the pandemic era and being able to onboard thousands of new employees with minimal onsite staff while shipping equipment globally.
Quick Facts:
- Business type (e.g. education, finance): Biotech
- Locations: EMEA / APAC / US
- Size of IT team: 25 service desk staff globally not including contractors
- Days and hours of operation: 24/7
- Multi-lingual?: English / Swedish / Chinese
- Number of customers supported: 10’000 internal customers
- Calls received per day: 80-100 phone calls per day
- ITSM Software: Fresh Service
