Case Study

UKN Group
UKN Group offers choice and improves customer service using Sunrise Software

www.sunrisesoftware.co.uk

UKN Group

stablished in 1997, UKN Group is a leading provider of Managed Services and authority for the strategic transition to either a complete virtualised infrastructure or cloud based proposition. The companys award winning response to the modern challenge of desktop and application delivery is at the forefront of an evolution allowing businesses to swap risk for resilience and reliability. Delivering services to corporate businesses and the public sector, UKN Group is an entry point to some of the industrys finest technical and operational resource. The company portfolio is organised into three core streams, ensuring clients receive excellent advice and support, appropriate to their individual circumstances. Specialties include; ICT Outsourcing, Microsoft Solutions, Application Virtualisation, VMware & Citrix, Cloud Services, Technology Innovation, Comprehensive Managed Services, and IT Transformation. Since 2005, UKN Group has relied on Sunrise Softwares IT Service Management solution, Sostenuto, to underpin these relationships, initially deploying a basic incident handling and reporting tool.

Introducing best practice to support business expansion

Three years later, in 2008, UKN Group turned to Sunrise to expand the Service Desk and support a period of unprecedented growth fuelled by a ten-fold increase in the companys customer base. It took the decision to amalgamate UKN Groups disparate Service Desks into one central Service Desk. The company then introduced a new Problem, Change and Configuration Management functionality based on ITIL bestpractice principles. According to Dean Coleman, Director of Client Services at UKN Group, achieving such a significant restructure would never have been possible without Sostenuto. The web-based technology guaranteed a quick and easy roll-out to all our offices and client sites.

Sunrise Software Ltd www.sunrisesoftware.co.uk

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Our processes have improved dramatically. They are now part of the whole business, not just IT

Continuous improvement attracts industry recognition

Over the past three years, the Sostenuto deployment has continued to evolve, supporting steady growth, a new Service Desk structure and a shift in the type of services offered to customers across the country. However, UKN Groups dedication and commitment to embedding best practice into the fabric of company culture have not changed. Sostenuto has been instrumental in increasing the companys success with its customers. It has played a central role in raising the bar for IT service delivery that benefits all customers. For some, having access to an ITIL-based service is a powerful competitive advantage and even a must have particularly for UKN Groups Public Sector customers such as NHS London and the Rural Payments Agency. ITIL still remains a fundamental part of UKN Group corporate strategy and Sostenuto has played a critical role in automating IT processes, translating them into workflows that support the overall business. Thanks to Sostenuto, our processes have improved dramatically. They are now part and parcel of the whole business, not just IT and have been critical to our continuous improvement programme, said Dean, a statement backed up by UKN Groups successful

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Dean Coleman
collaboration with the Service Desk Institute that has resulted in the recent prestigious accolade of 3 Star Service Desk Certification. The award recognises UKN Groups customerled Service Desk environment backed up by mature processes for IT and customer support and a solid framework for measuring team and customer service targets.
Director of Client Services at UKN Group

Flexibility tailors service to suit

One of the major benefits of Sostenuto is the flexibility of the system. UKN Group has adopted many ITIL3 processes which have been adapted to meet the differing requirements of customers. This can be a challenge especially when faced with real-life scenarios such as managing multiple client Service Level Agreements (SLAs), a hurdle that is no barrier to Sostenuto, as Dean explains, The beauty of the product lies in its flexibility. It is highly customisable and can be tweaked to our desires. It simply takes ITIL and maps it to our specific business needs, enabling us to provide a tailored service for customers.

The biggest benefit of self-service has been for our customers who have come to expect a variety of communication options. Today, they have an extra level of choice, whether they prefer to contact us by telephone, in person, by email or simply do it themselves. Sostenuto has helped us yet again be ahead of the game, infinitely stepping up our potential to increase our interaction with clients and improve the overall customer experience.

Promising results herald optimistic future

Since deploying Sostenuto, UKN Group has noticed a series of considerable benefits. It has translated a process framework into distinct commercial advantage with the ability to achieve consistent SLA targets of around 95% every month. Automated notification emails and monthly reports continually alert customers to the progress being made on their calls, a big comfort factor and huge contributor to customer satisfaction rates. Additional time savings have been achieved by introducing Sostenutos event management functionality which extracts data from the companys various monitoring tools and feeds it directly into the Sostenuto system. Incidents are then generated and assigned automatically to the right people to accelerate incident handling and problem resolution. In 2011, UKN Group noticed a 28% drop in incidents through improvements in Problem Management. With accurate trend analysis data, the Service Desk is able to pinpoint potential issues and address them before they spiral out of control and affect customer service levels.

Self-service drives efficiency, delivers more customer choice

In the middle of 2011, Dean and his team worked closely with Sunrise Software to further enhance the Sostenuto Service Desk and better manage customer SLAs. They introduced a new self-service portal based on Sunrises Iguana technology platform that enables customers to log and track their incidents themselves anytime, anywhere. This development has attracted positive feedback and yielded rapid results. Since introducing the portal, the greatest shift has been in the number of people logging incidents themselves rather than by email. Although telephone call volumes remained static, the Service Desk team have saved significant amounts of time because details of each incident are now captured directly from the user when they log their call within Sostenuto.

Sostenuto has helped us yet again be ahead of the game, infinitely stepping up our potential to increase our interaction with clients and improve the overall customer experiences

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UKN Group

Likewise, UKN Group boasts a 100% capture rate through the introduction of a robust Change Management process and dedicated Change Advisory Board. The company now has an accurate and real-time view of every single device across a customers infrastructure, invaluable for solving technical issues or assessing risk. Most recently, Dean and his team have used Sostenuto to create a strong customer satisfaction process whereby they record the results of customer surveys and match them up with SLA

reports to obtain a balanced and failsafe view of how they are really measuring up to customer expectations. Dean Coleman concludes, If it werent for Sostenutos ability to manage processes, information and change, we would not have achieved industry recognition for our best-practice approach to IT service delivery. This has a direct impact on client confidence and gives us the hard evidence we need to develop services our customers want at a satisfaction level they rightly deserve.

About Us
Established in 1994, Sunrise provides applications which underpin business processes across its customers organisations. A privately held, UK based company, Sunrise has a highly successful track record in IT service management, customer service management and business process management with fully configured applications designed around best practice guidelines. Available as either on-premise or Software as a Service (SaaS) Sostenuto, Sunrises flagship product is totally web-based which harnesses modern technology with inbuilt resilience. Sostenuto is a comprehensive software tool which offers a high degreeof flexibility, allowing organisations to change or introduce new processes through simple configuration.

Sunrise Headquarters 50 Barwell Business Park Leatherhead Road, Chessington Surrey KT9 2NY, United Kingdom

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