About Essentra
Essentra are a manufacturing organisation with a global footprint. The company, an SDI Corporate Member, operates internationally from headquarters in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.
The Essentra Challenge
Just over three years ago, the decision was made to outsource the service desk function to an overseas service provider. However, this strategy didn’t work out for Essentra.
Activities were co-ordinated with a typically transactional approach, with little focus on the customer experience. As the Head of IT Service Management, Poonam Chauhan was bought in by Andy Garrard (Global Head or IT Delivery) to bring the service desk back in-house and to restore a positive perception and experience of the delivered service.
Poonam’s challenge included running a project that focused on value, broke down silo’s, improved service levels and improved the user experience, a project led by Project Manager David Bothwell.
How they successfully overcame them
Following conversations at a senior level, Essentra decided on a follow-the-sun style service desk. The benefits of this included local knowledge, shared cultures and interests, along with the ability to provide multi-language support 24 hours a day. Further to this, Poonam built a team that was diverse in backgrounds, experience, and gender, considering the best skills for the role, to deliver a service experience that would consider the requirements of as many users as possible.
Poonam utilised the expertise and experience in the HR team and sought cross-departmental input to design job descriptions that would capture the imaginations of exactly the sort of people needed to build a great team. Shift patterns were introduced for the service desk to encourage flexibility and appeal to working families.
The project initially kicked off in January 2019 and in just 6 months, the new service went live. In February 2019, Jonathan Bewley, Global Service Desk Manager for Europe, was hired and worked alongside Poonam to build up the function including joining the steering committee. An agile approach was used to reach the delivery goals in the shortest time possible, with a strong emphasis and focus on value, and prioritisation of the user experience. Different working streams were created, to involve many different areas of the business and bring about a sharper focus on different success factors. Streams included commercial and legal, property, people, process and communications. Many key members of the Essentra team were involved in making sure the project was successful including the steering group. Videos and presentations were used throughout the project to keep the business and it’s users updated on the progress towards targets.
Results
Poonam is already seeing higher customer satisfaction ratings being reported by the business. Just in March 2019, the open ticket count was around 8500, which has now been reduced to under 1750 and continually reducing! The success of the Service Improvement process has had such a brilliant effect; Essentra are finalists in the Best Service Improvement category for SDI’s IT Service and Support Awards 2020!
The next challenge for Essentra will be getting measurements and reporting in place to a more detailed level and continuing to improve service delivery to a higher standard.
Essentra receive exclusive benefits of holding a Corporate Membership with SDI. Membership provides many free event places for SDI’s Service Improvement, Service Desk Strategy and other events, access to a wealth of resources that can help to deliver Best Practice along with discounts and offers on professional training, development and recruitment. Find out more about SDI Membership today:
