A long experience of looking forward
Landis+Gyr offers leading integrated energy management solutions for the utility sector in 30 countries. It delivers a full portfolio of innovative and flexible products that solve complex challenges and improve operations while lowering costs. But even with 125 years of experience, the company must constantly navigate demanding, fast-paced industry challenges to stay in the lead.
This heavily regulated environment requires technological innovation, interoperability and data security and privacy, which Landis+Gyr weaves seamlessly into its daily operations together with meaningful environmental and sustainability efforts.
But the company challenges itself by striving to remain one step ahead technologically while fulfilling its commitment to delivering meaningful and reliable customer care.
Landis+Gyr’s forward and innovative way of thinking, as well as the determination to continually improve its customer service, led it to ServiceNow. “With ServiceNow solutions, and the integration capabilities between the applications, you can start to expand their benefits in an efficient way that affects internal and external customers globally,” says José Miranda, Global Information Technology Director at Landis+Gyr.
ServiceNow’s ability to help assure secure operations was a key benefit to Landis+Gyr, with Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) and Security Operations (SecOps) implemented first to improve the company’s security controls and risk posture. “We take information security, and security in general, very seriously because of the type of solution that we provide to our customers,” says José.
“Failures in our products would impact their operations. Additionally, with GRC and SecOps we now have pre-built market frameworks that enable a fast implementation, as well as automated and integrated processes to respond to internal and external customers better and faster.”
This solution was closely followed by other tools, including IT Service Management (ITSM) and Customer Service Management (CSM). The rollout was staggered through all geographical locations.
Serving internal customers
Landis+Gyr has been moving its IT focus away from regional reporting lines and toward centralisation, so having the ServiceNow Platform allowed it to continue transforming its IT into a global department. “ServiceNow helped us solidify this change,” says José. “With ITSM, we enable internal customers to do more in less time while providing our IT teams with tools that they did not have before and that allow them to work on a global scale.”
ITSM helps Landis+Gyr support internal customers in ways that are much more streamlined and efficient. It also offers them options to self-serve and solve their queries faster with a comprehensive knowledge base.
“There is even a shopping list where employees can request a new computer or a new keyboard, and the request goes directly to the relevant people,” comments José. “This solution might seem simple, but it really makes a difference.”
New solutions are not the only way that the company is supporting its internal customers. Automation and standardisation also play a big role in process optimisation, which is vital for Landis+Gyr.
For example, introducing automation elements in ITSM allows support staff to bypass a level of incident processing in situations where the system shows that it would only create additional manual work. Bypassing an unnecessary stage in the process means that the incident can be moved automatically to the right group, helping employees save time and effort, as well as solve issues faster and more efficiently.
Improving external customer experience
The company’s new, global and centralised IT doesn’t stand in the way of more bespoke and localised solutions for external customers. Quite the opposite. CSM helps Landis+Gyr manage a huge range of escalations and customer support requests while also providing a new capability with self-service options. And although IT was the department that implemented CSM, it’s the regional Operational Technology (OT) areas that handle customer cases through CSM clearly benefiting from this tool. “CSM is how we take care of our customers now,” says José.
The first step was utilising CSM to create a new customer portal with catalogues and knowledge base. “We give them more self-service options this way,” continues José. What’s more, localisation tools, such as a translator integration, mean that support can be provided regardless of geographical or language requirements. “It allows us to work on a global scale with customers all over the world,” comments José.
The ability to standardise, support and integrate it into service management processes has provided a change of pace and a more efficient environment that supports the company’s mission to continually streamline customer care. “Overall, the integrated process gives the customer the visibility that they need and allows us to have all the dots connected,” says José. “The feedback we got from internal and external customers has been very good.”
Change management and ESG journey
In addition to the impact that ServiceNow has had on customer support, José stresses the importance of change management in the company’s journey. “It’s all about the process and how it can be cross-functional, which is very important in a company as diverse as ours,” he says. “That’s the key element when we talk about digitisation because it has the biggest impact on a company and its productivity.”
Improving change management with simple out-of-the-box capabilities contributed to further process optimisations. These included the company’s integration with SAP, which is a very controlled environment and any change, such as a purchase or payment process, needs to be tracked at the most detailed level.
“This process was manual before,” explains José. “People had to copy and paste a lot and create tickets on both sides. Now, everything happens and is orchestrated by ServiceNow in an automated way.”
However, streamlining customer experience and improving service and processes are part of an even bigger picture for Landis+Gyr—its environmental, social and governance (ESG) objectives. “We provide everything that utilities need to manage energy better,” says José. “And by helping them do that, we are helping the environment.”
All the improvements provided by the ServiceNow Platform, including integrations with development solutions such as Azure DevOps for Microsoft, enable the company to work in a more optimised and lean way, helping Landis+Gyr be more sustainable and pass this result on to its customers.
“This will help with the overall environmental sustainability,” says José. “By using ServiceNow to streamline and automate processes, we can continue to be a leader for another 125 years. It will be good for our customers and, therefore, for the environment.”
Maximising potential
Overall, ServiceNow is helping Landis+Gyr contribute to its ESG objectives and improve its business agility and operations. This impact, seen in a relatively short timeframe, has had a powerful effect on internal and external customer relations, while providing a platform for future improvements.
“Our ServiceNow pipeline means that we can deliver new solutions to our users very quickly and fulfil our business requirements while keeping the backbone very robust because, with ServiceNow, we have resilience and stability,” says José. “We have a platform that works for us with every new integration, not the other way round.”
Landis+Gyr has just implemented ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) across Global IT to gain greater visibility over strategic projects and to leverage the integrated processes within SPM itself. In fact, the company now has a one-page view of all requested and approved demands and projects to Global IT. The team is also evaluating Virtual Agent and AI capabilities to further improve user experience while maximising the ServiceNow Platform. “This is a big part of sustainability,” comments José. “I want to make sure that we leverage the powerful resources that we already have. But I want to continue to expand and bring on additional applications.”