We are a growing company and have many concurrent IT projects underway, especially with the move to electronic health records, and simultaneous product upgrades. Our patient base is also growing, but our IT department head count remains flat to maintain cost controls. Since it was so easy to get up and running, Giva has helped us leverage technology to make each of us in IT more productive and effective at our jobs. Working with the Giva professional services team, we were able to configure and customize Giva in just a few days. Also, since Giva is in the cloud, we did not have to install any software, and we do not need to worry about data archiving or hardware maintenance as the cloud-based model provides daily and weekly back-ups and other extensive disaster recovery capabilities. Further, no staging environment is needed for implementing upgrades, and so we can save costs and manpower in this area as well. With Giva, we are able to put our full focus on higher-priority projects that more directly impact providing outstanding patient care.
We are encouraging our physicians and staff to use the Giva self-service web portal, which has yielded excellent results in allowing us to service them better. We have been successful in transitioning them from sending emails for help to going to the self-service portal to open a service request directly by answering a few questions. Giva automatically creates the service request using an API, thus eliminating emails, which has helped boost the productivity of the IT department by 70% since we do not have to cut and paste the information into the Giva call tracking system.
Also, previously with our users contacting IT by email, it was difficult to determine their specific issue since they were just providing free-form text. Now, we get specific details already well documented in a service request. They do not have to log into any application, which saves them time and effort as well.
Although by using the self-service portal we have significantly reduced the number of emails that we receive, we still allow contact via email. We have continued to increase IT productivity by using Giva's automatic email-toticket conversion process, which also accepts embedded screen shots and file attachments. When screen shots are converted into a service request, they are cross referenced and numbered so we know how they may relate to one another and the free-form text that was in the original email. This is just one example of Giva's focus on intuitiveness.
It is very important for us to keep in constant communication with users until problems are resolved, which is even more important because our sites are geographically separated. Giva has allowed us to significantly improve these types of communications with our users. We can add questions to service requests, and then with a single click, send the question to the user via an email. The user can then simply reply to the email with the answers, and all of this interaction is booked and detailed in the service request. When anyone in IT reviews a service request in Giva, all the details are in one place, even if multiple people are working on the same service request, which is often the case. As a result, with Giva we have increased our customer satisfaction by 65%.
Besides the above-mentioned benefits, the Giva knowledgebase is much better and more functional than the one available by Helix Remedyforce by BMC and Salesforce. com, and has allowed us to increase first call resolution by 65%. It is easy to create knowledge articles and cycle them through an approval process, and there are reports that help us keep the knowledgebase up-to-date and relevant. There are also metrics, such as problem solving scores and user ratings, which help make sure that only the most relevant knowledge is maintained. Moreover, we can determine which of our IT users are proposing the most useful knowledge. We have considered offering incentives to participate in this, hopefully generating some healthy competition and bringing the best out in everybody.
For asset tracking, the Giva eAsset Management module is highly functional and vastly better than what is available in BMC Helix Remedyforce. It uses a third party application that did not meet our needs and would require interaction with yet another vendor, which would involve more time and complexity. With Giva, we do not have to be concerned with these extra issues and costs.