"Giva is very easy to use and intuitive, and quick and cost-efficient to set up and customize. It is a highly visual product with icons and 'human friendly formats' that remind me of the Apple genre, with a clean, easy, elegant and simple to use interface.
- Michael Kircher, Vice President Customer Service, Invivo
Invivo's Results Using Giva's Cloud Call Center & Customer Service Software
The Giva HIPAA-compliant Cloud Service Management Suite provided Invivo with a:
- 70% increase in productivity by using Giva dashboards and reports
- 60% increase in productivity in managing customer service level agreements (SLAs)
- 70% easier to get up and running on Giva
- Eliminated 30 hours/month of work to prepare executive reports/scorecards/KPIs
- 75% better technical support as compared to other technology vendors
- 40% increase in productivity of remote Field Service Engineers
About Invivo
Invivo Corporation is the market leader in the design and manufacture of RF coils, MRI-compatible patient vital signs monitors, bedside monitoring and telemetry products for hospitals and healthcare organizations. As a wholly owned subsidiary of Philips Medical Systems, Invivo provides customer service to over 11,000 customers around the world. The Giva Service Management Suite™ including Giva® CustomerService™, Giva KnowledgeManager™ and Giva AssetManager™ was deployed in the cloud as their customer service solution.
Giva was 70% easier to get up and running as compared to other cloud applications.
Giva has helped our Field Service Engineers increase their productivity by over 40%.
The Giva reports and dashboards have increased our productivity by over 70%.
- Michael Kircher, Vice President Customer Service, Invivo
Invivo Case Study
Michael Kircher, Vice President Customer Service
Terri Schweiger, Manager Technical Support
The Challenge: Medical device manufacturer sought customizable, cloud-based help desk software
Invivo is the market leader in the design and manufacture of RF coils, MRI-compatible patient vital signs monitors, bedside monitoring and telemetry products for hospitals and healthcare organizations. We serve the healthcare market and major healthcare equipment manufacturers--Philips Medical Systems, GE Healthcare, Siemens Medical Solutions and Toshiba Medical Systems. Our customer service organization supports over 11,000 customers around the world.
Since we are providing customer service and technical product support to healthcare organizations, our work is often very time sensitive. If our technically advanced healthcare equipment is not operational, then hospitals and clinics cannot serve patients, and revenue generation is directly impacted. The respond and resolve service level agreements (SLAs) that we provide to our customers are very critical for us to meet and exceed. Our goal is to provide outstanding technical support and rapidly resolve problems or escalate them to the appropriate Level 2 technical resources.
Before Giva, we used an internally developed customer service application that was well-tailored and customized to our requirements. However, since our customer base is growing and our requirements for reporting and dashboards are getting much more sophisticated, we outgrew this application. We were looking for an easy to use SaaS cloud-based application that we could quickly deploy and maintain with a minimum of effort and cost. We did not want to have to dedicate internal IT resources to maintain the hardware and software infrastructure to support a local customer service application. By implementing a cloud application, we knew that we could reduce the total cost of ownership by approximately two thirds.
We needed high quality, real-time, visual reports that we could easily build, run and share so our senior executives could take actionable steps to better manage our growing business lines. In using our old application to generate reports, we had to pull data from multiple sources, manipulate raw data using excel files, and then integrate it all together. This was very labor intensive, requiring approximately 30 hours a month of work and causing us to lose a significant amount of productivity. Also, we also could not view urgent information in any kind of dashboard, and many important issues were not quickly highlighted or escalated, which led to customer dissatisfaction.
The Solution: Giva deployed quickly and easily, and it's highly customizable
Fluent in 1 hour
For us, Giva was 70% easier to get up and running as compared to other cloud applications. Giva deployed very quickly and very simply, despite our requirements for a high degree of customization. Also, we were able to rapidly import 11,000 detailed customer profiles as well as a history of 30,000 previous service requests so we would have data for comparative reporting purposes.
We found Giva to have so much flexibility and customization capability, which require no technical skills. We can customize Giva to the "Nth" degree with little or no assistance from technical support. For example, I can personally add new fields to Giva and then generate, save and share reports with those newly-formatted fields. This kind of ease of use and intuitiveness is very valuable to us and is intrinsic throughout the entire suite of Giva applications. But despite this kind of flexibility, the entire suite of applications is extremely simple to use. Giva trained our agents to be productive in only a few 30 minute training sessions; and with just a bit more self-discovery, our agents were truly fluent with Giva in just one hour. All our agents are very pleased, and Giva has helped their productivity significantly increase.
With Giva, we can have the relevant information in front of our agents, thereby allowing them to more quickly open cases. Our agents can view 50 or more records in a single page, and as necessary, can drill down to obtain more detailed information. The screen workflow in Giva is highly intuitive and well thought out, which leads to shorter and more productive calls with customers.
Invivo has integrated our Field Service Engineer trip reports into Giva by adding a number of custom fields, which was simple to do and did not require any coding or professional service work from Giva or outside consultants. With these fields and several reports, Giva has helped our Field Service Engineers increase their productivity by over 40%.
All the work our Field Service Engineers perform onsite is accurately captured in Giva and is shared as needed. We use the Giva AssetManager module to monitor our installed base of technical products at all customer locations around the world. We used Giva's unique and intuitive fast form deploy capability to quickly build a custom asset form with 35 fields, which only required about 1 hour of work and no coding.
The Giva AssetManager module is extremely easy to learn with very little training, and is easy to use and intuitive when compared with other systems that we evaluated. We can search any of the 35 custom fields in the installed base on any criteria. When any of our installed base products are modified, upgraded, repaired, etc., permanent notes are booked to the respective product profiles so we know exactly all the changes made by our Field Service Engineers. This has significantly increased our productivity and customer satisfaction as Giva is the single "source of truth" for our installed base.
We have also increased our support revenue generation with the AssetManager module. For example, we can quickly run a report on each product serial number to determine when support contracts are about to expire, which we provide to our sales teams, who can then engage with customers. Also, when our customer service agents are speaking with customers, they can quickly and effortlessly determine if a product is covered by a support entitlement agreement; and if it is not, then they can ask for a purchase order to extend the support agreement. This has helped us make sure that we are meeting our support commitments and generating new support revenues that are consistent with customer expectations.
With Giva, we have a very comprehensive profile of each of our 11,000 customers. In just one click, we can view the last time they called, their complete service request history going back years, contract information, service entitlements, and equipment purchased. All of this information is easy to maintain in Giva. With Giva's REST based API, we can push and pull information to and from Giva and our SAP system or any another application as a feed; and so, we may integrate Giva with our SAP in the coming year. Since our Field Service Engineers and agents document all customer interactions in Giva, this integration would help us share all this valuable customer information throughout Invivo.
Once again, Giva is very easy to use and intuitive, and quick and cost-efficient to set up and customize. It is a highly visual product with icons and "human friendly formats" that remind me of the Apple genre, with a clean, easy, elegant and simple to use interface.
The Results: 70% increase in productivity, reduction of wasted FTE hours
Real-time reports & dashboards without effort
The Giva reports and dashboards have increased our productivity by over 70%, and I have eliminated over 30 hours per month of work generating reports to monitor key trends/score cards for senior management. The Giva trend reports are very important to me, since I can now lead our organization with metrics/KPIs, establish benchmarks, and show improvements to the senior executive team. Before using Giva, I could not easily generate this very important information.
Giva's reporting engine is the most simple and powerful tool that I have ever used. I can run reports with different specific criteria and then save multiple versions of the same report. On the following day, week, month, etc., I can run the same report with just a single click from my "Favorites" menu; and the report is refreshed with real-time data without making any changes to the report filters. Also, I can receive via email any of the reports and review them offline in the evenings or while I am commuting.
With Giva, our productivity has increase 60% in managing our service level agreements (SLAs). The SLA compliance trends reports help me more closely measure the performance of our customer service organization. I can also save and share the reports I create with my team leaders so we can more easily collaborate and remain in sync.
Furthermore, we have saved approximately 30 hours per month, since it is much easier to monitor customer service level agreements (SLAs). Our manager-level productivity has dramatically increased since we now have a portal that will show us real-time information. Throughout the day in between calls and meetings, I take quick glances at the dashboards to monitor our customer SLAs and make sure we are delivering outstanding service to our customers. It is important for us to get real-time trend analysis to see if we are over or under customer SLAs, so if necessary, I can take quick corrective action, which will increase customer satisfaction. Before using Giva, we were not able to get that kind of information.
The Giva knowledge base has also helped us all increase productivity. I can easily do a natural language or Boolean search to find an answer so I do not have to interrupt an agent while they are on the phone with customers. The knowledgebase also allows our agents to increase first call resolution by having answers right at their fingertips, which is significantly increasing customer satisfaction. Further, with the knowledge base we are building, we do not have to escalate as many service requests to the second level of support. Our first level agents are much more prepared with solutions and technical tips, and we are finding that the knowledgebase is allowing us to decrease the call time as well. This saves money by allowing us to have more customer interactions in less time and have higher quality calls with less follow-up.
Our Field Service Engineers use Giva to track their billable/non-billable time along with their travel expenses. As a result, we are realizing support services revenue and travel expense reimbursement at a much higher level, and we have better control over managing the travel spending of our Field Service Engineers. We are also using Giva to better determine the cost of our warranty service for each customer, thereby allowing us to determine if we are making money or losing money on support contracts. In the future, this kind of analysis will enable us to more accurately price our support services.
It is critical that our new customer deployments go well so that we generate high customer satisfaction. With Giva, all the information about new customers, with all the associated details, is in one place. Customer service, R&D, Field Service Engineers, etc. can all collaborate in Giva and instantly share information and updates.
There is an extraordinary amount of functionality in Giva that we are beginning to use, and we can see how it will help to further increase our productivity and lower costs. We will begin using the Giva customer satisfaction survey shortly, as it is very easy to build a custom survey; and the associated reports will allow us to track trends and visually analyze the data and prepare reports for senior executives. Today, we are using a third party survey tool that is not as powerful as Giva. The integration of the call tracking system and the customer satisfaction surveying will also allow us to more closely monitor the performance of our agents, which will then be integrated into personnel reviews.
We use the root cause summary report to quickly determine what specific products are failing and for what reasons. This has helped us be more proactive with our R&D organization and get some early data so that we can proactively fix problems when required. This has significantly increased customer satisfaction since we can now proactively warn customers of possible problems when we have a reasonable sample size. These are key benefits of having access to real-time information.
Highly customizable without consultants
As I mentioned, it was over 70% easier to get up and running on Giva as compared with other cloud based products. I have a lot of experience deploying applications for internal use; and the Giva deployment was highly organized, systematic and predictable. Even though we had to cut over to Giva from our old customer support application under a tight timeline, Giva met all the milestones in our carefully planned migration. Giva went beyond the call of duty as their professional services personnel worked day and night so that we could make the strict deadlines that we established.
After understanding our strategic and tactical requirements, Giva provided careful guidance on how to best customize and deploy the system and take advantage of all the features so that we would meet all of our requirements and maximize customer satisfaction. Giva's professional services personnel are outstanding. They took the time to understand our business by asking questions and uncovering our unique needs and limits. After they understood the broad implications and directions, they made recommendations that led us to improve some practices in our technical support organization. Giva shared industry best practices and advised us on how similar companies in our industry are leveraging Giva to generate a high ROI.
Outstanding Technical Support
Giva's technical support is over 75% better as compared with technical support that we receive from other technology companies. Their response time is very fast and typically is less than twelve hours. There is also an extraordinary escalation policy that puts important issues on a fast track to resolve in just hours, which we rarely find in any technology company. We can access SLA compliance reports to measure if Giva is meeting its contractually committed respond and resolve times as well. Furthermore, Giva has implemented a number of very important enhancements for which we had asked that has helped us further increase productivity and lower our support costs. We appreciate having an Account Manager that is very attentive to our needs, and all the Giva support and account management folks provide outstanding, personalized service. We are well satisfied with Giva.
As compared with Dell and Hewlett-Packard, Giva is an absolute pleasure to work with. In addition, Giva agents are native English speakers and based in the USA, and are extremely helpful and knowledgeable about all aspects of the product. We know technical support and the complexities involved in supporting software, and we hold the Giva technical support organization in very high regard and as a model to emulate for other technology companies. I enthusiastically and whole heartedly endorse Giva and would recommend Giva to any of my colleagues.
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