Effective customer service is critical to Netology, a South African company with a core focus on outsourced network support, specialising in networking and related services.
With this in mind, and in order to expand their business, a formalised service management infrastructure was required, which would scale with their business and provide an easy upgrade path as the business grows. Netology turned to Marval South Africa and its Marval Service Management software product to provide the solution to their challenge.
“As our business has matured, we have begun to offer a hybrid of services to meet the market and our customers’ needs.
“In order to cater to these additional services, our current helpdesk solution would have required a significant amount of manual intervention to cater for this. We realised that our business had outgrown our systems and as such, we required a robust service management solution that would automate processes and procedures.
“We also needed a solution based on ITIL best practice, as we are gearing towards full ITIL adoption. Marval’s Service Management solution met all of these requirements,” says Darryl Maroun, MD at Netology.
Netology required several functionalities from their ITSM solution, including incident management, request fulfilment, basic asset management, service level management, financial management and reporting tools.
They also required a solution that would integrate with N-Able, the company’s existing discovery software which collects the granular details of all devices on the network for use in filtering, monitoring and management activities.
Marval’s Service Management solution met each of these requirements as it is based on the ITIL framework and ISO20000, laying the foundations for ITIL adoption as the organisation matures further.
Utilising Marval’s Service Management solution assisted Netology to structure service levels according to the needs of the customer, and offer enhanced management of service levels for faster turnaround time and improved customer service.
“Prior to starting implementation, we ran several consultancy workshops with Netology to ensure their needs and expectations were aligned with what their chosen solution could provide. We also worked hand-in-hand with the Netology team on configuration and development, and have provided full product training to ensure the users can derive maximum value from the system.
“The success of any IT service management project relies on a triumvirate of consultancy, technology and education, and following this methodology has resulted in an implementation for Netology that delivers real business value,” says Edward Carbutt, executive director at Marval South Africa.
The investigation process was concluded in May 2013, with implementation beginning in June and the project was completed just six weeks later in mid-July.
This minimised the cost of running parallel with the existing tool. The solution is now ‘live’ and all customers will be migrated onto the new system by the end of August. The entire process was completed on time and on budget, and Netology and its customers can now take advantage of the many benefits that the Marval Service Management solution offers.
“The Marval Service Management solution enables us to better manage and plan our resources. We have also seen a significant benefit from improved reporting, as the type of information we can extract from the system and deliver to our customers is of excellent quality and importantly, accurate.
“For example, our clients have a clear and accurate view of our performance against the service level agreement (SLA) with our reporting.
The solution also gives us more control of incidents and interactions with our customers, resulting in shorter resolution and customer satisfaction as well as improving customer communication. Ultimately Marval’s Service Management software gives us improved customer communication, confidence and satisfaction,” says Maroun.
“The team from Marval South Africa were professional throughout, taking the time and effort to understand our business, and working with us through the entire process. The implementation was completed within our expected timeframe and within budget. The capabilities of the Marval Service Management solution also created a paradigm shift in our view of what we could achieve with the solution,” he concludes.