"Giva's HIPAA compliant cloud IT help desk application has been an important foundation to our new strategy in IT, and has helped us achieve a 90% Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance.
- Louis Duhé, Vice President & Chief Information Officer, Athens Regional Health System
Athens Regional Health System's Results Using Giva's Cloud IT Help Desk Results Using Giva Software
The Giva HIPAA-compliant Cloud Service Management Suite resulted in a:
- Increased to 90% achievement in meeting service level agreements
- 70% reduction in generating reports and admin; eliminated 35 hours/month
- 50% faster to create/assign a service request
- 60% increase in information captured during the initial phone call
- 50% increase in the number of service requests created due to intuitive design
- Saving approximately three quarters of an FTE due to lower ongoing administration
- 80% easier to navigate and manage service requests
- Significantly increased IT staff productivity for some IT teams
- 35% decrease in follow-up after initial call
- 30% increase in productivity with self-service capability
- Giva technical support rated 9 on a scale of 1 to 10
About Athens Regional Health System
Athens Regional Health System (ARHS) is one of northeast Georgia's largest health care systems with 3,500 employees and 100 IT staff and composed of an acute care facility with 350-plus beds, four urgent care centers, a quality network of physicians and specialists, a health maintenance organization and a home health agency. ARHS services a 17-county service area in northeast Georgia.
The ability to have standardized questions related to the call category automatically appear on the screen is helping us capture 60% more information in the initial phone call.
We estimate that the IT team is capturing approximately 50% more service requests due to Giva's intuitive design.
With Giva, we have reduced the amount of time we spend working on generating reports and metrics by 70%. We eliminated 35 hours per month of work from general system maintenance and report generation.
- Louis Duhé, Vice President & Chief Information Officer, Athens Regional Health System
Athens Regional Health System Case Study
Louis Duhé, Vice President & Chief Information Officer
Skipper Crews, Application Support Manager
Daniel Reeves, .NET/SharePoint Developer
The Challenge
We started looking for a new solution to transition from having to maintain our inhouse developed IT help desk application as it was difficult to find skilled technical resources. There were parts of it that were always a work in progress and it was challenging to maintain its development as our organization grew.
We could not track Service Level Agreements or easily reassign tickets. The reporting was very limited and executed with SQL queries so the IT team could not slice and dice the data without technical assistance. There was no email-to-ticket conversion and limited self-service capability, which were significant frustrations.
Our objectives were to lower support costs by decreasing the number of phone calls and emails that we received each day and increase customer satisfaction by providing a better user experience. We wanted to be able to answer customer calls knowing any other open issues so we could place the current call in the proper context. We wanted to increase productivity by automating our call workflow.
We were interested in a cloud solution to reduce upfront and ongoing administration costs. We wanted a new system that was easy to implement, customize, and had the flexibility to meet our requirements. We were also concerned about protecting PHI and remaining in HIPAA compliance so the new cloud help desk had to be HIPAA compliant and the vendor had to sign our Business Associates Agreement.
The Solution & Results
We have been using Giva for about two years, but we still consider ourselves in phase 1 of the deployment since there are many features that we have not yet implemented. We really like how we can incrementally roll out Giva to generate a quick ROI. Our estimates of percent improvements are based upon our qualitative judgments.
Improved issue tracking, customizable workflows
Using Giva we have been able to improve communication with our customers and allow for better issue tracking, assignment, progress and resolution. There have been many other process changes that contributed to this increase, but Giva's HIPAA compliant cloud IT help desk application has been an important foundation to our new strategy in IT. Giva has helped us achieve a 90% Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance which has directly helped us increase customer satisfaction. Giva has excellent workflow capability which is easy to customize and it helps us to be more disciplined. Based upon the Giva reports and metrics, better process/ workflow, and our new knowledgebase, certain IT department personnel have significantly increased their productivity.
Automated responses for common issues
Since Giva is very intuitive to use, we have been able to leverage our hospital call center team (non technical personnel) as the level 1 IT help desk support team. This 24 x 7 call center team answers approximately 2.7 million calls per year. The ability to have standardized questions related to the call category automatically appear on the screen is helping us capture 60% more information in the initial phone call. Obtaining more accurate information from callers and proper ticket routing to appropriate teams has allowed us to decrease email and phone call follow-up by approximately 35%.
With Giva, a service request can be created and assigned 50% faster as compared to our previous IT help desk software. Our call center team performs basic troubleshooting using Giva tools and documents the call by asking standardized questions. In many cases the call center can resolve the problem immediately or it can be quickly assigned and escalated to the correct resource. With this new support model we are saving a significant amount of money and providing improved customer service.
It is 80% easier to navigate around and search in Giva as compared to our old internally developed IT help desk and there is a larger number of IT people using Giva. We estimate that the IT team is capturing approximately 50% more service requests due to Giva's intuitive design. It was so much more difficult to open service requests in our previous system so many issues were not carefully tracked and included in our metrics.
Giva is easy to use
We have knowledge of a number of other IT service desk systems. With respect to reporting and the user interface, Giva is much more polished and elegant with a better layout, colors and screens. Giva is easy to use and not intimidating or overwhelming and has an excellent overall appearance and presentation.
Giva's email-to-ticket conversion capability captures all files or screenshots without any limits. Giva has the intelligence to parse out redundant email threads so it is very easy to read history notes when there is a lot of dialogue between our IT staff and customers using their email.
Email to ticket process improvement
Previously, approximately 25% of our service requests came from emails and now that has decreased to 4% since using the self-help feature. Giva's self-help API capability allowed us to build our own custom form so our users can open a service request quickly on our Intranet. The form's intelligent features route service requests to the correct assignee or service group to speed resolution. Now we have excellent self-service capability and it has increased our productivity about 30%.
IT help desk automation
With Giva, we have reduced the amount of time we spend working on generating reports and metrics by 70%. We eliminated 35 hours per month of work from general system maintenance and report generation. Today, we only spend approximately 1.5 hours a week on generating reports. We can create and save reports and automatically run them on a scheduled basis to distribution lists. It is also very easy to create and save unique versions of each report and share them so if one person discovers an insight they can quickly share it.
With Giva's powerful reporting capability we have increased productivity by leveraging and sharing more information across the IT department. We use the administration reports to periodically ascertain that our configuration/customization is always properly tuned to get the best results.
With Giva, there is no need for a "reporting guru". Our CIO or anybody can run reports without any technical assistance which was not possible in the past. We are also confident that the reporting metrics are more accurate and actionable as compared to our previous system. Measuring the performance of our teams is very important to us. Giva reporting allows us to measure individual and team performance with objective metrics that are easy to generate and monitor in a "single pane of glass".
We have realized up to a 50% increase in productivity with the dashboards. The dashboards on the home page are outstanding and help our teams better focus on their priorities related to their direct responsibilities and as a result we have become more responsive to our customers. Our IT team does not have to constantly monitor their email looking for assignment notifications since it is all on the Giva dashboards. We have one place to manage any tickets, projects and tasks.
Customizable dashboards for IT team
The entire IT team can view their own easily customized home page dashboard with relevant charts and metrics highlighting the areas of their responsibility. Since we have a high volume of calls where very specialized skills are required, it is important that key technicians get immediate visibility from the dashboard. We also like the grid dashboard where we can quickly monitor when customers update tickets so we can quickly follow-up.
The customization and configuration is very flexible and easily meet our needs with little consulting services even though we have approximately 70 service groups and a complex call category menu. The ease of Giva administration and the point and click interface which required no coding was a very big win for us. Before Giva, we had a few different people who were spending time managing our homegrown application which in total required about one FTE. Today, it only requires approximately one quarter FTE to manage Giva thus saving about three quarters of an FTE.
It was very straightforward to get up and running on Giva. The basic set up has 9 steps and it is well documented. There are popular and optional set-up sections where additional customization is possible for advanced functionality. The product documentation is excellent although in most cases it was not needed. Giva provides a great user experience and it is obvious that usability is a top priority and well thought out. During the initial set-up, Giva helped us with insights of how their other hospital and healthcare customers use Giva which was very helpful to us.
Giva API allows integrations
We are using Giva's REST-based API to integrate our Lawson HR system with Giva. The integration was very straightforward and the documentation terrific. This integration has also help lower administration time as all staffing changes are automatically synchronized. We plan on doing more integration with Giva and other systems to streamline more businesses processes.
Giva's cloud IT help desk is very fast and responsive. Its performance is about the same as what we had with our on premise home grown system. In contrast, Giva has rich graphics and useful information that constantly refreshes on the home page so they have done an excellent job in building a very fast and responsive cloud application.
We compared Giva to the following vendors: ServiceNow™ IT Service Management, Cherwell Service Management™, SysAid ITSM™, Solarwinds Web Help Desk®, Autotask™ IT Business Management, and ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus™. After our rigorous analysis and numerous product trials, we confidently chose the Giva Service Management Suite since it best met our requirements.
Giva is Agile
Giva is in the very top tier of technical support organizations we have worked with; on a scale of 1 to 10 Giva is a 9. Giva technical support has been outstanding as they are very responsive to us all the time. We like the fact that their support team will send us follow-up reminders, if we have not yet responded with answers so that nothing falls through the cracks.
Giva is very open to making product improvements. They use an agile development approach placing into production a new release every 3 weeks. They have already made a number of improvements that we requested and our Account Manager visits with us on a regular basis to make sure Giva is aware of our evolving requirements. We made the right decision in selecting Giva and are very happy with them. We are very pleased to recommend Giva to our hospital and healthcare colleagues.
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