Patient Care Technology Systems Case Study

ITIL standards are a sound foundation for our internal and external customer support. Since PCTS provides mission critical products that help track patients and related medical information in emergency and operating rooms at hospitals nationwide, we may be audited for state and federal health care quality standards. So, I wanted to ensure that PCTS followed high quality processes and procedures.

We were using help desk software designed primarily to track application bugs and bug fixes. We realized that it did not meet the needs of our IT help desk or customer service desk. We looked carefully at a number of vendors, but we narrowed our short list to BMC Footprints Service Desk Suite and the Giva Service Management Suite.

We were impressed by Giva from the start—they worked with us to document the functionality that we needed, as well as the benefits that we expected. They told us where they met our requirements and where they did not.

This exercise required us to prioritize the features that we really needed and the features we were willing to pay for. This ultimately made the selection process much easier since we had objective selection criteria to evaluate any vendor.

We purchased the hosted version of Giva CustomerService to service and support our customers, Giva HelpDesk for our internal IT help desk, Giva KnowledgeManager to help us access the right information at the right time, and Giva ChangeManager to manage requests for change. While these are independent applications, they are also very highly integrated, and we get a greater benefit than with standalone applications. For example, Giva KnowledgeManager is seamlessly integrated with both Giva CustomerService and Giva HelpDesk. This allows our agents to create knowledge records during the process of creating a service request—we can create knowledge in the knowledge management system right at the discovery point, so it is more accurate and does not require any extra steps that busy support staff often may not take.

Giva allows us to configure our customer service desk and our internal IT help desk as two separate, independent service desks—one for external customer support and one for internal help desk. No other vendor provided this functionality.

Giva allows each service desk to share a centralized customer, employee, and knowledge database, while allowing us to uniquely configure different service desks. This way we can keep service requests from our customers segregated from our employees' service requests. An added benefit is that there are cross-service desk aggregated reports that give us a complete view of what is going on at anytime in our organization.

We also use Giva ChangeManager, a web-based change management solution, to manage change requests via an ITIL-compliant workflow process. This assures us that all requests for change go through a review and authorization process with an audit trail. The Giva change management software was easy to configure to work with our workflow and approval process. It provides us with a change management system and change management tools that will help us comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Giva ChangeManager is also well integrated with Giva CustomerService and Giva HelpDesk, allowing our support staff to quickly determine if the root cause of a problem is due to a recent change that was executed by one of our other departments.

The real-time reports are exceptional, and all specifically relate to ITIL compliance. We can easily customize them to meet our needs. The Giva reporting approach saves us a lot of time and money because the reports provide the right information and we do not have to purchase a separate reporting package. Many other vendors' products require purchase of reporting software and only deliver pre-configured reports that are not useful.

Giva KnowledgeManager lets our employees and customers leverage a knowledge base of known problems, solutions, and FAQs—both our employees and customers access the Giva knowledge management software though the intuitive, easy-to-use Giva user interface. The Giva knowledge base software has many excellent security policies that are useful in a medical environment. We can designate knowledge records as public or private or set up a number of security levels to allow certain people access to specific groups of records.

The Giva Service Management Suite was easy and fast to deploy for our geographically dispersed workforce. Our customers and employees can access Giva anytime, anywhere in the world, with just a standard Web browser.

At the same time, we have full control over all the applications and administration and the ability to customize them to meet our unique needs. Working with Giva, we only needed about a week to configure and customize all the products to meet our needs—we did not even need to do any programming. All the administration is point-and-click and based on common Web metaphors. There is no customer software to install, manage, maintain or upgrade. As a result, we anticipate generating a rapid ROI.

We have customer service and support organizations on both east and west coasts and customers all over the nation. Allowing our customers to access the Web-native Giva KnowledgeManager knowledge base software helps us decrease our call volume and increase customer satisfaction.

Giva did not have some functionality that was an important part of our requirements. However, they were able to eventually meet these requirements by asking us to provide details for their R&D team. We were impressed with the fact that they committed to do this work and then they actually did it in a reasonable turnaround time.

We are just beginning to use Giva real-time reports to measure a number of key metrics such as first call resolution, SLA compliance, and customer satisfaction. Root cause analytics allow us to identify how we can take action to reduce calls and further increase customer satisfaction. Trend reports allow us to follow our progress over time and report results to our senior management in an elegant report format with graphics and charts. Giva real-time reports are a significant benefit that other vendors do not provide. Also, once we run Giva reports, we can easily download the data for further analysis or reformat it to meet our specific needs.

The Giva Service Management Suite is a highly reliable solution which meets the demanding and high expectations of our customers. Giva provides exceptional service and support. When Giva makes commitments they consistently meet them. They have earned our trust by being attentive and responsive to our suggestions, concerns, and questions.

At PCTS, our products are used in mission critical applications. We needed a help desk and customer service solution provider that we could trust with such a high level of expectation from our end-user customers. We also needed a highly reliable product with exceptional service and support. We have found both of these with Giva.

In summary, we purchased a highly reliable product suite with a great deal of functionality at a low total cost of ownership from a company that provides exceptional service. We are very pleased with our experience with Giva.