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Vitality UK offers health insurance, life insurance and car insurance, and uses incentives that reward its customers for making positive lifestyle choices.
They like to share the benefits of healthy living and call this shared value insurance and investments. Vitality aims to make people healthier and enhance and protect their lives which is a uniquely positive way to offer financial services. Their business is growing rapidly, including the recently launched car insurance products.
Vitality is based in the UK with its head offices in London and Bournemouth and its contact center in Stockport. The company has over a million members and employs around 3,000 people. In addition, Vitality works with a large number of franchises across the UK.
Vitality wanted to further automate and improve processes across the company and not restrict itself to what an ITSM tool can do today.
Dave Kelsall, SIAM Lead at Vitality, explains: “We are driving the experience for our members, and we also want to drive it for our staff and people who interact with IT.”
The ITSM tool Vitality used before couldn’t easily deliver everything it was looking for. It was slow to respond to changing service demand and licensing and resources were expensive.
Vitality was looking for a state-of-the-art SIAM solution that would meet their growing service needs and enable them to add additional accounts and services in no time for a reasonable price.
This solution should also enable Vitality to collaborate with different people and departments across and outside the organization, so it would truly become an enterprise service management solution.
They decided to do an RFP for this new ITSM or ESM tool. Dave: “We invited all the usual suspects, Ivanti, Cherwell, ServiceNow, and 4me.”
In addition, 4me’s ability to implement and adapt fast was much appreciated as well as the attractive pricing and flexible licensing model.
Dave: “4me’s pricing and flexible licensing model was a big selling point as our previous provider was quite expensive. Effectively, we reduced the cost by 50%, and that includes the licensing and using Revo as a managed services partner. We’ve got a team there that we can call at all times and that can handle everything for us. That to me, is an absolute bargain. We absolutely get value for money.”
Industry
- Insurance
Location
- UK
Challenges
- Vitality wanted to switch to a future-proof enterprise service management solution that would meet the growing service needs and enable them to add additional services in no time for a reasonable price.
- This solution should also enable seamless collaboration with different people and departments across and outside the organization.
Solution
- ITSM, ESM, SIAM
“It’s amazing what we’ve achieved in a relatively short period of time. 4me’s ability to scale has impressed us massively. It’s a big difference compared to before. We had slow delivery processes on our previous tool, and now we’ve been able to pick up additional services within weeks, not months.”
Dave Kelsall
SIAM Lead
Vitality went live with 4me in July 2020. The implementation went smoothly, and the collaboration with 4me partner Revo was great. Working with a small team, the whole process, from signing the contract to landing this in July, took just three months.
Automation through integration is one of the key 4me benefits for Vitality. Integrating 4me with other business-critical applications is easy and can be done quickly. They can be delivered at a much faster pace than before, making them very agile.
Vitality uses microservices a lot to support internal DevOps teams, and one of the big things achieved was the integration of Dynatrace to monitor and manage these microservices which are an ecosystem in itself. Revo played an important role in achieving this.
Completed integrations also include the original ServiceNow integrations with strategic partners, HR system Success Factors, AWS, Active Directory, InTune, SCCM, SailPoint, Ansible Tower, Jenkins and other CMDB sources.
- Request fulfillment
- Knowledge Management
- Problem management
- Incident management
- Configuration and Asset Management
- Service Level Management
- Change Management
- Event Management
- Project Management
- Risk Management
There was not much training necessary because the tool is so easy to understand and work with. Dave: “It’s very intuitive, even I can use it and I haven’t done any of the training.”
In the end, around 30 IT people did the training; others used the 4me training videos.
Dave: “The benefit is in automation; we can now automate everything. The integrations are key for me. This has given us a true shift left. Everything ends up with the right service desk people. That flow, that automation, works brilliantly for us.”
Vitality has seen the customer experience improve. Pushing services into the structure that 4me provides meant that Vitality has been able to accelerate the delivery and move them off shared mailboxes, delivering benefits to their customers quickly.
Vitality even uses 4me to manage everyday business resources, such as booking a hot desk. This capability was built within a week. So when staff were allowed back to the office after COVID 19, the team quickly developed a system to manage the return to the office; from vaccination checks and confirmation of negative tests to reserving a hot desk, all managed in 4me.
Dave: “Coming in as an ITIL-based tool, it very quickly grew into a full-blown ESM tool. Much more quickly than expected.” Security and Operations, Group Risk and Compliance, and IT are on there, and the team did an integration to CA to send tickets to parent company Discovery. Referrals, which is like a call center, was added at the same time. The franchises Vitality works with for their investment products are very demanding. It is very important that they get a swift response to a ticket; otherwise, they just go somewhere else. They went on quite soon afterward. Others quickly followed. HR is on it, and so is Facilities Management.
The simplicity of the platform allows people to use it; they like to use it. That’s why so many people are on it. One-third of all Vitality employees are specialists in one area or other, which means around 1,000 employees of the 3,000 in total.
4me also gives third parties access to the Vitality environment to log tickets directly. Pushing it out to those teams and letting them handle those tickets themselves was a bit of a culture change, but everyone quickly saw the benefits.
Dave has seen great results over the past two years: “It’s amazing what we’ve achieved in a relatively short period of time. 4me’s ability to scale has impressed us massively. It’s a big difference compared to before. We had slow delivery processes on our previous tool, and now we’ve been able to pick up additional services within weeks, not months.”
Processes have improved tremendously. Vitality now gets the ticket to the right resolver pretty much first time. They’ve seen the calls to the helpdesk drop as well, thanks to the proactive approach to services.
A key part of Vitality’s strategy is also to make the users of 4me even more self-sufficient. At the moment, about 70% solve issues using 4me’s Self Service portal. The idea is to drive self-service even more in the future by structuring data and improving knowledge management.
Dave: “For Vitality, the understanding of our services and our service catalog has led to the greatest efficiency gains. We are able to offer the right services to our customers, understanding all their needs, and can resolve their tickets quicker because we understand what we do and how we do it.”
“Being able to use the tool right across the enterprise allows us to be much more agile to deliver for our customers; it drives our proactive servicing model. It also drives our SIAM model so we can see what our suppliers are doing, and we can drive SLAs and XLAs to see how we as a business function deliver value to our customers.”
The future for Vitality and 4me is to look at how the customer experience can be further optimized. Vitality believes the best way to do that is through proactive servicing. Understanding the needs of their customers before they need them. Vitality wants to structure the services better to improve things further. Dave says, “I never worry about the 4me tool; I know it can do anything. We have to get our process right.”
“I would recommend 4me and Revo to other companies looking to future-proof ESM. We are 100% satisfied with the 4me tool. And we only see it growing as a partnership, really.”
Dave Kelsall
SIAM Lead
