When care provider, Agincare, decided to invest in a Xurrent service management system, one of their key priorities was to gain central oversight over incidents and requests—in particular those resolved via their managed service provider (MSP). Here, we ask Head of IT, Matt Garland, and Service Desk Manager, Carine Appleby to share how Revo’s integration expertise enabled them to achieve this goal.
Agincare is a family-owned care provider founded in 1986. Over the years, the group has expanded to operate across 80 locations, including just over 30 care homes, and employing about 4,500 staff. This growth continues, with plans now afoot to add children’s services to their care portfoio. As the complexity of the business grows, visibility over IT issues and requests has become vital to deliver an efficient service desk experience. But their reliance on manual processes was making it increasingly difficult to for the team to efficiently support requests for IT support and services.
“We were facing a black hole”
When Matthew Garland joined Agincare as Head of IT, one of his first priorities was updating the organisation’s manual IT service desk processes. The organisation’s existing approach relied on support cases being raised through emails and calls, making service requests and incidents difficult to track and manage.
“We were operating on just email and people calling in,” explains Matt. “We were pretty good at incident management—if someone came to us and said, ‘this is broken’, we would go and fix it—but for service requests, sometimes things got missed and there was also a lack of feedback to users. A user would log an initial request and say, ‘I need x’ and then they wouldn’t hear from us for five or six days. Then, all of a sudden it turns up, but in the interim, they wouldn’t know what’s going on.”
In particular, there was a lack of visibility of the service requests directed through the business’ third party managed service provider.
“We were facing a black hole,” Matt explains. “Users were contacting the third party directly and we had no oversight of this internally. So, if 10 users in the finance team all emailed in saying my Sage isn’t working, we [the internal IT team] wouldn’t find out until someone complained to us.”
Recognising an opportunity for Xurrent to act a centralised hub for all IT service requests, Agincare appointed Revo to advise them not only on the implementation of a Xurrent service management system but also to develop an integration to connect Xurrent with the MSP’s third-party platform.
Creating a central hub for IT services requests
The aim of the integration was to enable tickets and request data to flow seamlessly between Agincare and their MSP, making it easier to track issues, collaborate and escalate issues if required.
“With the integration, Xurrent now sits in-between us and our third party, providing oversight on all incidents,” says Matt. “Users log everything in Xurrent, and then, depending on which template they select or which service instance it is, it either gets assigned to our internal team or it is sent via the integration directly to our third party—without any hands-on intervention from us. So, whether we’re servicing a case or not, we can see it, monitor it, and we can apply pressure if required.”
This not only simplifies and unifies Agincare’s support desk processes, it also provides critical oversight on how the third party is performing against key performance indicators. This allows the Agincare team to more proactively manage the performance of their MSP when required. For example, they can now step in and perform problem management on their queue and escalate any aged tickets they identify. This has led to improvements in key SLAs, in particular resolution times.
For more information about our work with Agincare, read the full success story. And if you’re interested in finding out how Revo could support your integration requirements, we’d love to talk you through our approach.
