Leading law firm Herbert Smith rules in favor of Infra's global service desk
Top-ten UK law firm Herbert Smith LLP is an international legal practice, comprising more than 1,100 lawyers and a network of offices throughout Europe and Asia. The full-service commercial firm has a formal alliance with leading European firms Gleiss Lutz and Stibbe, and provides advice across all major practice areas including capital markets, dispute resolution, employment and European Union law, intellectual property, finance, tax and real estate.
Herbert Smith attaches great importance to providing outstanding levels of customer service to its many clients and requires excellent IT systems to effectively support the success of its business. The ability to swiftly resolve support issues affecting the firm's IT and telecommunications infrastructure is therefore a top priority for the IT department.
It was becoming evident that Herbert Smith's existing call management system was insufficient for the firm's increasing IT Service Management needs. The call logging process was unwieldy, calls were taking too long to complete and the system did not support proactive Problem Management. As a result, Herbert Smith decided to commission consultancy firm Plan-Net to develop a service improvement process based on ITIL best practice.
Implementing ITIL processes with Infra
A "key criteria" checklist was
developed for the selection of a new
service desk solution with tenders
invited from a number of leading
providers, including EMC Infra
whose proposal was successful.
Catherine Cheetham, Service Management Team Leader within the Information Services Department (ISD) at Herbert Smith comments, "The decision to choose Infra software was based on our immediate business requirement for an easy-to configure, web-based service desk that would allow proactive Incident/ Problem/Known Error lifecycle management.
"Significantly, Infra also offered advanced features such as time-zoning, which actively supported our goal to implement a global service desk for business critical issues."
Infra global service desk
Within Herbert Smith, ISD, based in
London, provides a 24-hour weekday
service desk for users as well as
weekend cover. A team of fourteen frontline and seven second level
analysts is responsible for managing
mission-critical service calls received
daily from lawyers and other
employees. Analysts are also located
in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris and
Moscow. Over 6,000 Incidents/Problems are logged each month using
Infra with typical problems
ranging from requests to reset
passwords or difficulties with Word
documents through to issues with
printers or email.
Since implementing the Infra system, calls initially logged in Europe or Asia can be seamlessly escalated to the second line in London, with each Incident/Problem being tracked through to closure. All calls logged are in the local time and time-zoning within Infra makes it possible to provide 24x7 support for issues categorized as business critical.
Efficient Problem Management
Using Infra, ISD can also accurately
monitor information such as the exact
nature of each call and the point at
which calls tend to be escalated to the
second level. Analysts have the ability
to link calls to a Known Problem,
enabling management to track the
volume of calls relating to specific
issues.
According to Catherine Cheetham, "With Infra, we can use tools such as Trend Analysis to enable us to identify issues sooner and when a Problem hits, processes are in place to allow us to manage it more effectively.
"As a result, there has been a marked improvement in efficiency with 75 per cent of all calls now resolved by the initial contact."
Sharing skills and knowledge is also much easier now that all international support teams are using the same system. Herbert Smith has implemented the Infra Knowledge Bank, building up a repository of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) to assist with troubleshooting for common problems. ISD in London also publishes information about Known Errors to the business via the Bulletin Board.
Business support with Infra
The successful implementation of the
global service desk has led to a number
of other support groups within the firm
adopting Infra. ISD now
manages frontline calls for the contact
management system and the accounts
system, ensuring that consistent
processes are followed and routing
calls to the relevant department for
application-specific support. Acting as
a single point of contact for frontline
calls ensures that best practice
processes are adhered to and enables
the consistent management of all calls
through to closure.
Several departments have also begun to use Infra software as a business system, replacing existing databases with limited functionality. For example, around 50 users in the Document Centre now log over 800 jobs per month within Infra. Similarly the Reprographics department, responsible for providing a fast turnaround photocopying service, is using Infra to manage 1,200 job requests monthly. Infra offers an easy-to-use yet comprehensive tracking system for job requests with partitioning within the system ensuring that users view only data relevant to each particular operation.
Integrated Change Management and Customer Portal
Looking to the future, Herbert Smith is
planning to implement Change
Management using Infra to
replace a number of other systems.
The firm anticipates that integrating
Change and Problem Management
processes will increase efficiency and
speed up the authorization and
implementation of Changes.
The introduction of Infra has certainly had a positive impact on customer satisfaction - 85 per cent of calls are now answered within just 30 seconds and the service desk is seen within the wider business as an efficient and effective way to resolve problems and action requests. Herbert Smith is also planning to provide user self-service in the future via the Infra Customer Portal, allowing calls to be logged to both ISD and to the busy Reprographics Centre.
Catherine Cheetham believes that the IT Department has found the ideal service management solution for Herbert Smith's international set-up.
"From the initial tendering process we got the strong sense that Infra was a company we could do business with. Infra software is smart and sophisticated, but not difficult to use or overly costly. In fact, Infra software does exactly what it says on the box, and where customization has been required, it has been simple. Infra's consulting and technical staff were - and continue to be - brilliant throughout.
"Infra has enabled us build the flexible global service desk solution that is right for our international support operation today and can be continually enhanced to meet our future needs."
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