The IT Service & Support Awards take place every Spring in Birmingham to celebrate all that is great about the IT service industry. The goal of the awards is to recognise and reward the real shining stars of our industry; those who are going above and beyond to achieve the incredible and offer something truly inspirational for their customers.
Here we interviewed the team at SCC – winners of the Best Managed Service Desk Award 2017 – a highly contested category featuring some incredibly fierce contenders. Finalists and runners up in this category were Littlefish and Agilisys.
SCC, what made you decide to enter the IT Service & Support Awards?
The SDI IT Support and Service awards are critically acclaimed and we aspire to achieve the accolade of Best Managed Service Desk in everything we do on a daily basis. To be recognised as the Best Managed Service Desk is a celebration of all of our customer driven service, development, relationships, processes and future evolution. We entered the awards to demonstrate that we achieve excellence in everything we do; the SDI awards is a great way of proving this.
What was the best part of the process for you?
The SDI awards allowed us to work together and really think about what we do and how it’s important for our customers. The entry process helped us think about these things in a different way to how we would consider it on a ‘business as usual’ basis. Working on our entry gave us the opportunity to do something fun and showcase ourselves to the business and to our customers. From creating our first written submission together to filming our awards night film around our offices, it was all a great experience.
In the last 12 months, what has been the most successful initiative your team has implemented to help your business improve its performance?
The last 12 months for SCC has been about looking beyond day-to-day business as usual customer service, to focus on what will really matter the most to our customers over the coming years. We’ve invested a lot into better understanding our customers, their needs and where they are going, by talking to them and really listening. From this, we’ve been able to build the foundations of our future customer services, focusing on knowledge management to extend the services we provide to our customers based on what they have been telling us. This evolution of our knowledge management is one of the most successful initiatives for the SCC Service Centre teams over the past twelve months as the vital understanding of our customer helps drive business improvement today, but more importantly for tomorrow and beyond.
Which aspect of your service do you believe your customers appreciate the most and why?
When our customers come to us, we make every effort and go above and beyond to ensure they know that they are not just a number or a ticket to us. To SCC, every single customer is different and has different needs, each customer is an individual and every customer matters. We take pride and effort in understanding our customers and what matters to them. This personalised service is something that our customers really appreciate because it shows that we go to the next level for them and we are here for them. It’s something we have done throughout the history of our service delivery and this is something that will never change.
What one thing do you think really makes SCC stand out as a service organisation?
We make IT work. We offer a complete service for our customers and we can take their pain away. As a service organisation, our portfolio of services is significant and broad, ranging from Fully Managed Services, Data Centre Services through to Supply Chain and Disposal. We can deliver each step of IT for an organisations with exceptional services to support our customers each step of the way. We go further and offer strategic service for our customers and if our customers need us to help them with their IT strategy we can. Every single element of SCC’s services is designed to make our customers lives easier and provide services in a personalised and bespoke way to suits the needs of our customers.
How are you preparing to evolve your service desk over the next few years? Please share your most exciting plan with us!
Our plan to evolve our Service Desk operation over the coming years is to collaborate technology investments with our excellent agent customer service. We want to do this to maintain exceptional customer service whilst reducing the price of these services to our customers and providing them with choice of service delivery. Our plans include, but aren’t limited to:
• The implementation and evolution of proactive outreach management – the ability to run outbound agentless phone, SMS and email campaigns to contact end users to issue surveys, close tickets and provide major incident updates (amongst other ideas).
• The broadening of our voice translation capabilities across European and international languages to offer customers cheaper service options for meeting multiple linguistic needs
• The evolution of our text and speech written translations to support the driving down of costs for multiple language needs
• Launching to our customers our Customer Service driven Virtual Agent (TinITy) to offer concierge, incident resolution, request fulfilment and self-service services to our end users.
• The service improvements working with Watson cognitive technologies – from Watson conversation, to analytics and broadening our scopes into their comprehensive API catalogue
What did it mean to your team to win your category this year?
Taking home the award at this year’s SDI awards meant everything to us. In our eyes, our team is the best, they work so hard every single day with every task they undertake. Winning this award reinforced and proved to our teams that what they do is great, and the incredible service they work extremely hard to ingrain in every aspect of SCC’s service delivery is recognised beyond SCC and our customers. Winning this award is a way of SCC saying thank you to its service teams for delivering the excellent service they do day-in, day-out.
How can your managed service desk win an award, just like SCC, in 2018?
The managed service desk award has been split in to two categories in 2018:
Best Large Enterprise Managed Service Provider
Best Small – Medium Enterprise Managed Service Provider
To enter your team simply take a look at the ‘How To Enter’ web page here. If you would prefer to speak to a member of the SDI awards team simply email us at awards@sdi-e.com or call us on 01689 889100.
